Re: BOOTER PLZ

On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 02:33:28PM +0200, Michal Ludvig wrote:

> Does anybody know WTF the yahoo booter is?

Yahoo has a chat system with a proprietary client for Windows. This client, since several versions, has blatant and exploitable bugs that allow to crash a client remotely. It's being abused by clueless people to crash clients of even more clueless people from that chat network, "booting them" from chat rooms (channels). That they have unpatched security holes that allow remote execution of arbitrary code doesn't even occur to the victims, their general reaction is searching for an exploit tool that allows them to "boot" others themselves.

For unknown reasons, one of them once posted to tech@ asking for such a tool, and because "yahoo booter" seems to cause almost no name collision on google, others find tech@ looking for those keywords, and post their own requests there, too.

I guess an appropriate answer to those requests would be to suggest replacing their chat client with a more secure implementation (like gaim running on OpenBSD, or whatever), but I think that would be lost on them due to abysmal clue level. None of them has ever managed to find list replies, much less engage in an actual conversation. :)

Daniel Received on Wed Sep 10 10:01:51 2003