Yes, my friend, we had some fun the first night we met. I still remember that moment, her stunned eyes, her efforts to say something. It was worth it. Twenty-two grand green for that facial expression. She was never able to say anything at all – it took me five minutes to pick a car and ten to pay for it. When it came to taking care of the documents and such, the manager spoke with her alone.
Having lived in both of Russia’s capitals, I can say with certainty that Piter isn’t a city, it’s a living organism. Only there will you get a smile on the street or in the metro for no reason, only there someone can meet you on the street and hang out with you for three days in a row, not paying attention to your financial or social status. It’s a city of soulful and easy-going people who absorb and drink life to the bottom. And the city itself will be living and hanging out together with you, as if whispering: “Come on, brother, I’m here, I’m with you!” And if you feel bad, if life seems shitty to you, it will take your hand and lead you to the shores of Neva and have a heartfelt talk with you. No, I am not crazy. The city really can talk. More like quietly and peacefully whisper into your ear. It’s a city built on bones, the city of dead souls, a magnanimous and cruel creation of humanity.
When I woke up after our partying, I had the first cigarette syndrome, as always. I wrote to you about it before, the feeling of the world becoming grey. First the realization of the money spent came, and then the thought that it’s time to do some more work.
I drank a cup of hot black tea and turned on my notebook. By the way, it was one of those laptops that I bought in Turkey for the first credit cards. I decided to leave one for myself then. Laptops always have advantages before a stationary computer because you can just throw it out of a nine-storey building and nobody will be able to prove anything. I even heard many stories where it was exactly what carders did. It’s better to lose a two-thousand-dollar laptop than to lose your freedom for five years.
I was not too happy with the Internet. One of St. Petersburg’s disadvantages – Internet providers: in Moscow they are much better developed and the prices are better. In the northern capital this market segment is, unfortunately, too monopolized. Sonya – that was my pet name for my Sony laptop – loaded Windows completely and I proceeded to tune the VPN (author’s note: it’s an encrypted Internet channel that is not tracked by the provider).
“Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh”, - ICQ chimed a bunch of messages. I guess somebody felt two weeks of my absence. My partners were worried why I have been missing because the business wasn’t moving. I quickly answered more than a dozen messages and stopped to talk to my comrade from Kazakhstan. I really wanted to get into the new segment of services – the ddos attack, so communication with him was not only interesting, it was educational.
I will not tell you in detail what ddos entails, you know it perfectly well; at least you have seen lots of real examples. Those who are interested can find many discussions on this topic in the search engines anyway.
— Hey, how are you, how’s your vacation? — a message was blinking.
— Hi, alright. How are you? How’s business? — I responded.
— The biz is going. I bought a new bot from a coder (author’s note: person who writes programs to order), it will hit a site with threefold force. Plus, the loads don’t die as much.
— How much does it cost? — I asked.
— 2k green.
— Not bad. Listen, I got an idea here, can your coder write a bot for me?
— Hm, I don’t know. What the hell do you need it for?
— You know. Just wanna mess with it a bit, it’s an interesting thing.
— Alright, I’ll talk to him and will give you an answer tomorrow.
— Okay. Thanks, friend.
— :) Don’t mention it.
So, one fishing pole is cast. I know that I could have bought a ddos bot for a few hundred dollars but it won’t be that effective. Then I would have to spend more money for purchasing the loads that will die quickly, if I save money now. So, I decided to purchase a bot to order right away.
In order to make the ddos structure understandable, I will write a short manual. I think our government and, especially, the “K” section, will not be happy with me, but, oh well, since I’m writing already, I may as well write it all.
A ddos bot is basically similar to a trojan, it infects your computer and sends responses to the admin panel once in ten to twenty minutes. It depends on the settings, you can tune it to send responses once a day too, actually, this way there are more chances that the infected machines will survive but it’s not that effective. So, on average, you have a response going out once in fifteen minutes. In order to infect computers, you only need loads for your bot-virus. This means to make other computers load it onto themselves. You can buy loads from sellers or make them yourself. I will not describe how they are made, maybe some other time, so just accept it as fact. You do not need a lot of loads – ten to fifteen thousand would do. With this you will have about four thousand online with a decent bot and one thousand with a crappy one, in other words, a cheaper one. But even a thousand bots online will be enough to kill a simple site. An infected machine will send a request to the admin panel where it will get a command similar to the following:
Flood http www.site.com/index.php
Machine understands it as having to refer to the aforementioned site once in two to three seconds. To refer is to send HTTP requests. So, when a thousand machines start to send this request once in two to three seconds, the site’s hosting service cannot handle it and it freezes. Not just the site freezes, but the whole entire server where this site is located. Usually the hosting company itself turns off the attacked site in order to take the load off the server and restore other resources. It’s all very simple.
There are a bunch of other types of requests, such as syn or data, but I will not describe them all. Whoever needs it, will figure it out.
It’s actually based on a very simple principle with an astounding effect. Nothing difficult. The most important thing is so the bot is not detected by an antivirus; otherwise you can lose more than two thirds of infected machines. That’s why you have to order one. Writing one usually takes about a month and it is not cheap, but the result is worth the investment.
The rest of the day and night I was working with my favorite Stick. I had enough things built up, I had to take care of everything and I couldn’t sleep anyway. St. Petersburg’s white nights. I really liked to walk around during this time of day. That’s why I finished my work at half till four, got on the bike and rode to Neva. It’s so cool. You’re walking on the embankment and there is not a soul around. Only Piter… and you. You get an impression that the whole city has died out and you’re walking on these deserted streets in daylight. Once in a while a barge passes through, that’s when their passage time is. During the night all the bridges get drawn and the inner city navigation commences. So, you wave at the lonely captain on the barge, smile and keep walking, submerged in your thoughts. When you reach the Palace square, you stop, admire the Winter Palace and a thought about majesty and meaning will flash through your head. History was made here after all. Tsars and Emperors, Katya, Lisa, Nikolays, Alexanders and Peter. He is sitting mounted on the horse so proudly, forever looking at the Vasilyevskiy Island. The locals say that when Peter the First built this down, a wandering old man came to him and said: “Your city will be glorious, all eyes of Europe will look towards it, but it will not stand forever. It will stand just over three hundred years.” I don’t know what Peter did with the old man then but the time has come. Piter just celebrated its three hundredth birthday. For some reason it seems to me that the old man was right then. I don’t know why, but I feel it. Too bad. I came to really love this city. It became close and dear to me; my soul is with it forever. And it will be very sad if it disappears.
People started to gradually appear on the streets. A new weekday, everyone hurries to work. I came back to the motorcycle and rode home. By the way, about the motorcycle. I would have never left my bike on the street for the night in Moscow, but here – no problem. And nothing happened to it.
I came home and took a shower. There was no point in going to bed anymore and a contrast shower is always invigorating, especially if you drink a cup of hot black tea after it. Many people prefer coffee but I poison my body too much with cognac, particularly my heart, so I prefer not to finish it off with coffee. I even have a mini-dream – to try the real British black tea. I’ve heard many positive things about it but never tried it.
I came back to the laptop and saw ICQ blinking about a new message. That was my comrade from Kazakhstan.
— Basically the coder agrees to write a bot for you as well. He will just make one a little different from the one he writes me. So, you owe fifteen hundred bucks.
— Why so cheap? I thought he writes yours for two thousand?
— It’s because I gave him a new client, he gave me back five hundred and will write two bots for three grand.
— Alright. Very well. Give me his wallet.
— Z*********. Caught it?
— Uh huh.
I opened my Webmoney wallet and transferred WMZ to the coder’s wallet.
— Ready. — I wrote.
— Excellent. The bot will be ready in about three weeks, at least mine. I think yours will be sometime around then too.
— OK. Thanks, friend.
— You’re welcome :) — he answered with a smiley face.