My pig

But the iPhone app has a few advantages. Per the Globe: “The application, which will be free to download from Apple, will allow residents to use the Global Positioning System function on their iPhones to pinpoint the precise location of the problem for City Hall. After submitting a complaint, users will get a tracking number, so they can pester city officials if the problem persists.” Ooh! Pestering city officials sounds like fun!

Or, as one blogger has pointed out already, the system could easily get flooded with photos accompanied by captions like “Please send a cop over to make these Yankees fans leave this bar.”

Beware, Citizen Connect: complaints about this ‘Aqua Hunger Teen Force’ ad campaign turned into a huge mess for Boston two years ago.

Citizen Connect has been submitted to Apple but hasn’t made it into the iTunes App Store just yet. When it does, it will be free.

That said, the idea of a complaint-filing iPhone app for Boston is particularly hilarious: the most famous instance of Boston municipal complaints in recent history happened when people started calling in concerns about suspicious-looking devices that turned out to be an ad campaign for the cartoon flick “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.” This fact, however, did not come to light until the city had already shut down all traffic on the Charles River.

Boston to launch complaint-filing iPhone app

The city of Boston is set to launch an officialiPhone application for residents to file complaints about “neighborhood nuisances–nasty potholes, graffiti-stained walls, blown street lights,” according to The Boston Globe.

Called Citizen Connect, the app will let Bostonians send pictures and tips right to City Hall.

The Boston Globe said Citizen Connect is the first app of its kind, but other cities have also been turning to new technology to make the minutiae of municipal government run more smoothly. New York’s 311 nonemergency hotline for residents now has a presence on Skype and Twitter. New York also now accepts photo and video submissions for 911 and 311.

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Botnet worm in DOS attacks could wipe data out on infected PCs

For more information listen to CNET blogger Larry Magid’s podcast on the subject.

Researchers are finding that the botnets launching the attacks are infected with several types of malware. The MyDoom worm is being used to spread infections between computers via e-mail, Symantec and other antivirus vendors have reported.

South Korea officials told reporters on Friday that the DOS attacks used 86 IP addresses in 16 countries, including South Korea, the U.S., Japan, and Guatemala, but not North Korea, according to an Associated Press report.

The denial-of-service attacks against Web sites in the U.S. and South Korea that started last weekend may have stopped for now, but code on the infected bots was set to wipe data on Friday, security experts said.

There are only about 50,000 infected PCs around the world being used in the attacks, which is relatively small compared to the millions that were infected withConficker, he said.

The Dozer Trojan serves as a backdoor and connects to IPs through certain ports, allowing it to update itself and to receive instructions on sites to attack, according to Symantec. It’s unclear if the DOS attacks will happen again because the infected PCs can receive new instructions at any time, Egan said.

The attacks started over the July 4 weekend launching distributed DOS attacks on dozens of government and commercial sites in the U.S. and South Korea. The attacks, which resurged during the week at least twice, affected sites including the White House, the Federal Trade Commission, the Secret Service, and The Washington Post.

One of the files dropped on infected PCs is programmed to wipe out files on the PC, including a master boot record, which will render the system inoperable when the PC is rebooted, Symantec said. “Basically, your system is in trouble if this executes,” Egan said.

“There is nothing new or novel in the technology,” he said. Judging by the high-profile sites attacked it’s likely the attackers are just trying to get attention, he added.

A dropper program called W32.Dozer that contains the other components is sent by W32.Mytob!gen to e-mail addresses it gathers from the compromised computer, the Symantec Response Blog says. If a user executes the attachment, W32.Dozer drops Trojan.Dozer and W32.Mydoom.A@mm on the system.

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Botnet expert suggests hitting cybercriminals in pocket book

SAN FRANCISCO–Technology is not enough to help the security industry keep botnets from stealing peoples’ money and committing denial-of-service attacks, a top botnet researcher said on Wednesday. His suggestion? Stop the flow of money to their coffers.

Computers can be infected in any number of ways, but typically they get a Trojan or other malicious program downloaded onto them without the owner’s knowledge, which happens either from visiting a Web site with malicious code on it or opening malicious attachments in e-mail.

Once infected, depending on the attack, a computer can be controlled by remote attackers who are able to steal data or instruct the computer and other so-called zombies into sending spam or launching distributed denial-of-service attacks to shut down Web sites.

“Right now, it’s risky to surf the Internet with a PC,” he said. “I would like to see us return to a time when you could surf the Internet and trust that your computer wasn’t going to get infected.”

Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor.

Meanwhile, national CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) organizations should be given authority to fight botnets, by ordering Internet service providers to shut down hosting providers, Stewart said. In South Korea, for example, malicious Internet activity dropped drastically when the CERT three got teeth, he added.

“We need to disrupt their business model and make it hard for them to carry out their attacks and make money,” Joe Stewart, a security researcher at SecureWorks, said in an interview at the RSA 2009 security conference here.

Researchers have focused on trying to stop attacks, but once they get a botnet operator kicked offline by shutting down its hosting provider it’s usually not long before the botnet cranks back up with its command-and-control server at a different location, he said. For example, four months after a major botnet hoster, McColo, was shut down in November, the spam volumes were back up to normal levels.

The organization would need funding, which could possibly come from the companies that seem to be impacted the most from cybercrime, like credit card processors, he said.

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