This Just In: The Internet Schemes to Let Everyone Know about K-ON Season 2
The second season of K-ON, a hot Japanese television series about a music club, has been confirmed on December, 30th during a live event at Yokohama, Japan. Little did the attendees of that concert know, it was just the beginning of a massive conspiracy being revealed.
The news of the second season of K-ON spread by word-of-mouth and using Japan’s extensive electronic and internet communication network as concert goers go online to affirmed of what they saw and heard on the show. TBS Japan’s website for the animated sit-com updated its graphic and reaffirmed the news. However, that was a trigger of something worse.
Cyber-investigators world-wide have been studying a newly-discovered botnet, a network of computers that are hijacked by malware or worm. While traditionally botnets are used to send spam messages, this new botnet, named Kado.3, not only send spam messages, but also compose viral marketing news posts about whatever is deemed the latest fad.
“You know all that chatter about Kanye West’s ‘Imma gonna let you finish’? Kado.3 was responsible for about 5-10% of the talk you see out there, mostly in the form of Twitter messages and pointless Tumblr posts,” said internet security expert Dr. Brian Conflick. Dr. Conflick is one of the first researchers who discovered the new bug, and what they saw might mark a new age in internet attacks.
“Kado.3 is smart enough to act completely autonomously and meaningfully compared to older botnets. Rather than just indiscriminately target its victims when spamming by generating email addresses randomly, Kado.3’s new design allows it to target specific individuals and access a wide variety of network types.” Dr. Conflict showed a real-life example in which a particular Twitter account was suddenly gaining thousands of followers within the matter of several hours. The Twitter account, undisclosed here to protect the privacy of the individual, was a musician who was already on Twitter for many months prior to the attack, and had only a few hundred followers at the time of the attack.
According to experts, like most modern botnets, Kado.3 will dial into pre-determined internet addresses to get software updates and instructions for further activities. Many of these internet addresses, as researchers have determined through reverse-engineering the botnet worm, originates from Japan. Further reverse engineering have revealed even more shocking effects.
“What makes Kado.3 incredible is that it can behave via triggers on the web, and they don’t have to be tied to these pre-determined update sites.” Dr. Conflick said. “We’ve discovered that certain fragments of code that passes through the infected computers’ web browsers can trigger a new set of behavior in Kado.3. It could be used to orchestrate a cascading attack in which the internet in general picks up these stray triggers innocuously, spread them around, but computers infected that consequently downloads the trigger will execute a new set of instructions, further spreading these triggers along the same transmission method that the infected computer was first infected. These triggers could be images. The first one we’ve found was a curious logo of some club that called itself ‘SOS.’ Thankfully from what we can tell, it did not trigger Kado.3 to become anything different, as if it was a test of some sort.”
What does this have to do with a Japanese TV show? Internet researchers discovered that a combination of the words and images of K-ON and its protagonist, Yui Hirasawa, as used by TBS’s website to announce the new season of the television show, is the next trigger of the Kado.3 worm. As expected, upon the first hours of the news breaking online, researchers detected a burst of activity of the Kado.3 botnet, causing an undetermined numbers of suspect blogs to suddenly parrot the news. Investigators are currently working on determining as to who could be behind this latest attack, even if it seems relatively innocuous.
“This is the biggest break we’ve had since discovering Kado.3,” James Torpi, a federal investigator working with various internet security institutions, described the developing situation. “Traditionally botnets are controlled via IRC or in the later cases, Twitter and other social networking sites. This is the first botnet that could be controlled from any plain website. It is of utmost importance that we get to the root of it and put an end to this new threat.”
[The above is fabricated, if you didn’t know.]
K-Onion
Fabrication aside, the speed at which this news “infected” the social mediasphere *was* almost botnet-like. It was everywhere in no time flat. But despite that being the case, I liked how almost every blog that picked it up treated it like a news scoop, despite the fact that they had already been “scooped” by nearly every other blog and website in existence. It’s like the process is that someone hears the news somehow and immediately thinks “I need to update my blog/Twitter!” without even thinking to look if they’re saying the same thing that everyone else already said in abundance. But hey, with that sort of influence on the anime fan community, they’re certainly continuing to build on their momentum. Cue another year of “moe is destroying modern anime as we know it” op-ed pieces, no doubt coming soon to blogs near you. ^^;
(And yes, I liked the onion. :p )
There’s no stopping it, I’m afraid. This is the sort of malware that people want their blogs to be infected with. The only feasible solution would be to obliterate Japan with long-range nukes and cut the network off from its source.
(On the other hand, they’ll just offshore the bots to China and respawn from there.)
Incidentally, the Irrelevant Image doesn’t seem so irrelevant to me, in view of the nature of this post and the fact that it would fit rather nicely into a certain famous parody news source which uses said Image as its logo.
I love you guys
You had me. The only thing I even questioned was ‘Dr. Conflick’. Cheeky bastard.
This would’ve been the perfect situation to do something like what Something Awful did with the #iranelection tag.
“researchers”
“K-On”
Oh you. By the way:
This is where I stopped reading.
What did you just write? I was too busy staring at Yui’s pantyhose’d legs.
You mean you *think* it’s fabricated. Honestly it’s fairly plausible that some viral marketers have at least considered this sort of thing already.
I suppose it could be [Based on a true story].
That Kado.3 is a resourceful bugger though. Not only in spreading the word, but in making the powers behind it loads of money.