Independence Day Sequel

[deanwebb]

Independence Day is having a sequel... the aliens are BACK!


Buuuuuuuut... it's 20 years later. A stoopid virus took them down in '96. These aliens, somehow, against all odds, developed the EXACT SAME TCP/IP stack that we use and have computers that execute the EXACT SAME CODE that we use.

So, how do the humans defeat the aliens this time around? Assume that the aliens have basically patched their code once after 1996, so that that virus won't work on them again. They haven't patched since. They have exactly one anti-virus signature. What brings them down in the sequel?

[deanwebb]

My first hack suggestion: Aliens have an open SMTP relay on their mothership. Russian hackers hit it and spam every inbox on that ship with phishing scams. It first locks up all their communications and then, as the aliens click on the link in the spam, the rootkit hits the mothership and that pushes out the worm payload.

The irony is that the Russians didn't even do anything special. They just did an IP range scan and found the open port 25...

[wintermute000]

It was a macbook in 1996, hence getting jiggy with it saved the world by hacking it via APPLETALK

[Reggle]

Hehehe. I liked the movie but the plot made no scientific sense at all.

[Nerm]

Hehehe. I liked the movie but the plot made no scientific sense at all.

Do they ever? It is Hollywood. I stopped trying to make sense of their movie/TV logic years ago lol.

[icecream-guy]

My first hack suggestion: Aliens have an open SMTP relay on their mothership. Russian hackers hit it and spam every inbox on that ship with phishing scams. It first locks up all their communications and then, as the aliens click on the link in the spam, the rootkit hits the mothership and that pushes out the worm payload.

The irony is that the Russians didn't even do anything special. They just did an IP range scan and found the open port 25...

I suppose that's better than them getting encrypted with ransomware and the aliens having a halarious adventure obtaining bitcoins to pay off the hackers to get the decryption key.....

[deanwebb]

I realized that, with 20 years to prepare for a potential re-visit, it would be the hacking equivalent of Home Alone.

Big, huge alien ship arrives and covers the Atlantic (never mind about the curvature of the earth and all that)... it's only because we WANTED them to get that close. And then...

Proposed hack number two: aliens have an open telnet port with no security. Within moments, we get into their edge routers and see all their command and control traffic passing in plaintext. Shortly after that, we're sending commands to shut down environmental controls not only to the mothership, but across the trunk communications line back to their core environment back home. We wipe out the aliens near earth, but preserve their systems so as to totally wipe out the threat posed by the rest of their infrastructure.

@ristau: that's my hack number three: "Gentlemen... you're going to need a lot of GPUs if you want your fleet back."

[Otanx]

I suppose that's better than them getting encrypted with ransomware and the aliens having a halarious adventure obtaining bitcoins to pay off the hackers to get the decryption key.....

Beat to the ransomware comment. This was going to be my suggestion, but as it was already taken my new suggestion is we DDoS them. During the movie it is revealed that the alien SCADA systems running the ship are connected to their main network. Because of the amount of bandwidth the alien ship has we coordinate with every DNS server admin on the planet to allow DNS recursive lookups, and then run the worlds largest DNS amplification attack. This should all be coordinated on the "dark web" to hide it from the aliens. The amount of traffic hitting the SCADA systems causes them to malfunction, and the ships engines fire uncontrollably, and the ship crashes into the sun.

-Otanx

[deanwebb]

Hack number four: betcha the aliens don't know about disabling the default VLAN...

[NetworkGroover]

I suppose that's better than them getting encrypted with ransomware and the aliens having a halarious adventure obtaining bitcoins to pay off the hackers to get the decryption key.....

This cracked me up