Screenshot of the Russian spam site o-o-6–o-o.com.
Paying for Russian Hacking
Interesting article on Wired today including a list of prices for hiring a Russian hacker:
- Basic crypter (for inserting rogue code into a benign file): $10-$30
- SOCKS bot (to get around firewalls): $100
- Hiring a DDoS attack: $30-$70/day, $1,200/month
- Email spam: $10 per one million emails
- Email spam (using a customer database): $50-$500 per one million emails
- SMS spam: $3-$150 per 100-100,000 messages
- Botnet: $200 for 2,000 bots
- DDoS botnet: $700
- ZeuS source code: $200-$500
- Windows rootkit (for installing malicious drivers): $292
- Hacking Facebook or Twitter account: $130
- Hacking Gmail account: $162
- Hacking corporate mailbox: $500
- Winlocker ransomware: $10-20
- Unintelligent exploit bundle: $25
- Intelligent exploit bundle: $10-$3,000
Via: Wired
Deepest Hole On Earth
The site of the deepest hole on Earth (well sort of, see Wikipedia article for clarification), the Kola Superdeep Borehole on the Kola Penninsula in Russia. Fascinating how completely empty and without fanfare the architecture is.
EDIT: as of January 2014, this is no longer the deepest hole. See this Wired article for info on two deeper holes, and a very nice sound installation created at one of them.
The location of the hole, as seen on Google Maps. Above photo via Wikipedia user Before My Ken.