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Treasury website hacked

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: May 3, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 116 words

For a short while today a couple of treas.gov websites were hacked, and were reaching out to an attack site in Ukraine. The websites involved were bep.gov (Bureau of Engraving and Printing), bep.treas.gov and moneyfactory.gov. They had been script injected with the line of code circled in red… Btw, you should _not_ mess with the attack site (grepad) … it was dead earlier today, but could easily come back to life. ...

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Hey! I will be back soon!

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 24, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 83 words

Hi dear visitors, I’m sorry I’ve not been here for a while, there are some personal problems here in my life and I could not keep up updating my blog 🙁 , I guess it would take up to one more week, so I hope I can back here updating my blog from next week 🙂 The best way you can help me is donate via the link in right column of the my blog. ...

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Microsoft Asked to Make a Federal Budget Video Game

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 17, 2010
  • Reading Time: 2 min
  • Word Count: 237 words

The Obama administration’s Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission has been working with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer to make a computer game about managing the United States federal budget and deficit, USA Today reports. President Obama appointed Erskine Bowles and Alan K. Simpson to lead an 18-person, bi-partisan commission to generate ideas for dealing with the nation’s rising deficit and other fiscal challenges. The game is just a footnote amid the commission’s broader objectives, of course, but it’s actually not a bad idea. ...

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Gmail Adds Drag-and-Drop to File Attachments

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 17, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 97 words

Gmail has a new feature for Firefox 3.6 and Google Chrome users: drag-and-drop file attachments. The feature is very straightforward — just drag files from your desktop onto your e-mail, and a green box will appear where you can drop your files. Google promises it will “enable this for other browsers as soon as they support this feature.” Why the wait? Drag-and-drop functionality is an HTML5 feature. Currently only the Gecko layout engine — the engine that powers Firefox — fully supports HTML5 drag-and-drop. WebKit, which powers both Safari and Chrome, has only partial support for drag-and-drop. ...

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How much do musicians make from online music sales?

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 17, 2010
  • Reading Time: 2 min
  • Word Count: 234 words

Short answer: an infinitesimally small amount. If you have any sympathy for musicians you’ll buy their CDs from their web sites or at their performances. That’s pretty much the conclusion you’ll draw from a great attempt at quantifying musicians’ pay rates in the online music business(es) by David McCandless of InformationIsBeautiful.net. McCandless tried to determine how many songs or CDs a musician would need to sell in various ways to make the U.S. minimum wage ($1,600 per month). It was a tough project. He wrote: “As ever, this was incredibly difficult to research. Industry figures are hard to get hold of.” ...

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Alyssa Milano Teaches Jimmy Kimmel How to Use Twitter

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 17, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 118 words

On Jimmy Kimmel Live 2 nights ago, Jimmy asked guest Alyssa Milano to explain Twitter and hashtags to him. In the video below, Alyssa explains that she tweets 12 to 22 times per day, that she likes to imagine Jimmy Kimmel naked when she’s nervous and that she uses a lot of hashtags — a big plus in my book. A closer look at the actress’s Twitter stream reveals that she uses TweetDeck, an app she likes so much that she asks Twitter “not to kill TweetDeck.” The acquisition of Tweetie has made the future of other third party Twitter clients a little uncertain, but with support like this, the folks at TweetDeck have nothing to worry about. ...

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A Trojan Adding Malicious Routing Entries

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 17, 2010
  • Reading Time: 2 min
  • Word Count: 297 words

Backdoor.Rohimafo is a Trojan that has several back door functions. It not only opens a back door and performs the usual functions but it also can perform some decidedly unusual functions. It attempts to block users from connecting to remote servers; not only specific servers but also specific network segments by using PersistentRoutes in Windows. PersistentRoutes can be used to add a routing entry to a routing table persistently. The route.exe command can be used to add an entry like the following: ...

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MySpace Upgrades Your Social Calendar

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 17, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 201 words

If you’re one of those people who scribbles your plans for a given week on the back of the junk mail in your purse (totally not me…), then you could probably benefit from MySpace’s new platform. Today, MySpace continues on its quest to distinguish itself as a place for entertainment and socializing with the addition of what is essentially a calendar that combines your events, your friends’ events, concerts and shindigs put on by your favorite artists and even events from your Facebook account. You can also buy concert tix from band pages and pages of other entertainers. ...

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Google: 11,000 domains carrying rogue security products

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 17, 2010
  • Reading Time: 2 min
  • Word Count: 261 words

Niels Provos of the Google Security Team has blogged about the rise of malicious web sites carrying rogue security products, which the Google team calls “Fake AV.” Google has been engaged in a constant battle against the sites because the operators who peddle them have been refining their techniques for poisoning Google search engine results in order to victimize Google users by drawing them to malicious download sites. He wrote: “we conducted an in-depth analysis of the prevalence of Fake AV over the course of the last 13 months, and the research paper containing our findings, ‘The Nocebo Effect on the Web: An Analysis of Fake AV distribution’ is going to be presented at the Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET) in San Jose, CA on April 27th.” ...

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UK firm offers clickjacking visualization tool

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 17, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 138 words

UK security firm Context Information Security Ltd., is making available a browser-based tool that will demonstrate clickjacking techniques that were discussed at a Blackhat Europe 2010 presentation. On the Context site, they said “Clickjacking is a term first introduced by Jeremiah Grossman and Robert Hansen in 2008 to describe a technique whereby an attacker tricks a user into performing certain actions on a website by hiding clickable elements inside an invisible iframe. ...

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