Do we have a Boinc virus?

If the account owner has done nothing and has nothing to hide, he would remove the "hidden" status of his systems. Then all could see how many he has. And he could point out the one or two that do not belong to him. I am sure as a major team leader he would notice a large number of systems reporting to his account if he did not own that many, and do something about it. (Not just start his own new team.)

By tracking IP addresses of connections for this account, it would not be too hard to tell which belong to his location/ISP, and which are from infected systems. Only then will they know how wide spread the problem is.

From Trux:

I do not think it is the same case. This one seems to use different credentials and the classic client. I'd be interested though if it was investigated and the perpetrator persecuted. I mean this is a clearly criminal activity and should be followed up as such, regardless if the author did it in sake of "helping" the science, or just to improve his ranking (and his ego). And since it is not too dificult to track down the account owner, and verifying if it was him who launched the virus, I wonder if the responsible authorities were informed.

P.S. If someone else did this, Carsten would only know about it if he looked at his stats, which not everybody does.

He definitely does - he changed the team from SETI Germany to his own one just few days ago. When doing it, you definitely have to pass through your account, where it is inavoidable that you see your RAC and your total credit. Well, now we can speculate that he has 1000 own hosts, and just this single and only stolen one - in that case you are certainly right - he would not notice the difference. However, I'd rather speculate the ratio is rather in the opposite way. Still only speculations. Hope we see the truth soon.

Autor Thread "schlechte Team-Statistik: deutsche Teams"
Carsten_Giese
Beiträge: 1
schlechte Team-Statistik: deutsche Teams (vom 12.01.2006 - 10:49:24) Mit Zitat antworten
Hallo, SetiGermany-Admins,
kann mir jemand die Frage beantworten, warum in Eurer Team-Statistik für die deutschen Teams nur die Teams angezeigt werden sollen, die mehr als 10 Mitglieder haben?

Wir haben auf unseren Firmenservern nur einen Account, haben aber über 6 Millionen Credits im Laufe der Jahre angesammelt. Meiner Meinung nach sollte doch die Anzahl der Credits beim Ranking im Vordergrund stehen und das sollte in Eurer Statistik doch auch durch das Ranking "belohnt" werden.

Wäre schön, wenn Ihr bei Euren Statistiken den Filter "mind. 10 Members" herausnehmen könntet, um auch kleinen und sehr erfolgreichen Teams eine Chance zu geben, bei Euch gelistet zu sein. Ansonsten entsteht doch m. E. der Eindruck, dass hier absichtlich mit Filtern "manipuliert" wird.

Gruß:
Carsten Giese
Deutsches Team "ESC-Consult"

He wrote he did not know how to write viruses. I wrote I'd be very interested in his opinion and explanation, since I assume he had to see the RAC increase. I am just afraid he won't answer anymore. I am temped to call him, but again, I am no official BOINC representant, and it is not my business to make any such investigation.

So far I have read a lot of speculation with no validation. There are a lot of great theories but nothing to really quantify any drastic measures. As earlier stated the best thing to do at this time would be to wait and see what the people at Berkeley come up with. It should be interesting.
____________
This is only a test...

[quote] This thread is already no doubt being indexed by Google. Don't expect someone using the search words 'BOINC virus' to bother with the tiny detail of reading the text, a match will be enough to prove the case.

If certain critical mass is reached, there will be 1000s of know-nothings reporting bad news, for every 1 who does know trying to tell the truth. The larger number wins

According to BOINCstats Carsten has got 13 hosts. So with an RAC of 120.000+ these have to be powerful machines at the upper range of what is available today. It would not make any sense to capture single machines unless they are very powerful too as slow PCs would not add to that RAC considerably. But such powerful machines tend to be administrated by very skilled persons who would get to the fraud in a minute. Replaced system files like the wupdmgr.exe would hardly go unheeded.

This sounds all too fishy to be a case of fraud by the account owner himself. I would rather expect a single and very bad joke, which fits with the number of 13 hosts; there surely will not be half a dozen captured average PCs among them as the supposed culprit would then have to have 6 or 7 own machines getting an RAC of 20.000 each, whew! With that crunching power, who needs to cheat for keeps of some hundred or even one or two thousand RAC?

Regards,

Christoph
____________
"I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant." R.M. Nixon

According to BOINCstats Carsten has got 13 hosts.<snip>
Regards,

Christoph