TechBlog

A survey of 54,000 households (129,000 people) commissioned by National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) last year found that 30 percent of U.S residents did not use the Internet at home or at work. The study, based on Census Bureau work, found that 64 percent of households had connections. In 2007, only 51 did. The NTIA researchers found that of those without connections, 38 percent said they didn’t need Internet and 26 percent said it was too expensive. In rural areas, 11 percent said they didn’t have any Internet access available. In urban areas, one percent said they couldn’t get it. ...

Evgeny Legerov, founder of Intevydis in Moscow, has created an exploit that hits a previously unknown heap-corruption vulnerability in the Firefox browser. The code isn’t readily available though, since he’s put it in a module to the automated exploitation system he sells (reportedly at a considerable price.) Legerov has not provided information on the vulnerability to Mozilla. The Intevydis site says: “Exploitation frameworks are not new on the market, but only we may offer you hundreds of CANVAS modules for unpatched and unknown vulnerabilities in highly popular software products.” ...

Symantec recently upgraded their scanner on VirusTotal to include their new reputation-based security engine. That has caused a spike in their detection rates, in particular Suspicious.Insight detections, and so I thought I’d take a few minutes to explain some of the background and what is going on. So what exactly is a Suspicious.Insight detection? These detections are derived from Symantec’s new reputation-based security technology. They highlight files that have not yet developed a strong reputation (either good or bad) amongst Symantec’s community of users. their goal is to keep their users’ machines safe, and part of achieving that goal means helping their users make informed choices about the files they allow on to their systems. Suspicious.Insight detections help shine a spotlight on files that have not yet developed a full reputation. ...

First, make a note: after Adobe updates, restart your machine immediately to remove the Adobe Download Manger – it can be a vector for malcode. Now, back to our story. Aviv Raff has discovered a vulnerability with Adobe’s web site in combination with its Download Manager, an ActiveX script that is used to download updates for Reader and Flash. After a Reader or Flash update the download manager remains running on a user’s machine until it is rebooted. Malicious operators could exploit it to download their code of choice. ...

“Dammed thieves. Stole our logo. I suppose we should be flattered, though.” — A.E. Old rogue, new package: AntivirusProtectionCenter av2009.exe : crc6:7f3d73762762 crc8:003091628c68decc md5:d71d1e303ab963fdae76936ba52a05b7\ AMC.exe : crc6:1d6922972762 crc8:003005cfbb91b729 md5:e5555754fd758fc2be1374796f9433e2\ Hash’s different from their PersonalAntiMalware added 2/16/2010 opener_.exe : crc6:8ee75c08081d \ crc8:00dc55e5aaa82efa md5:5bb290cd1eb419ca98ca1f31273f7219\ “It’s the same gang that had the code saying ‘hello Sunbelt software’ They are watching us.” — P.J.

Representatives of computer companies and governments meeting at the EastWest Institute security meeting in Brussels said that an industry culture of obscure jargon is preventing the world’s two billion Internet users from putting security measures in place to protect themselves. The group met to figure out how to protect computer users from massive abuse, fraud, online theft, vandalism and espionage. The New York Times story carried the following quotes from those at the meeting: ...

In the month of January, we reported a drop in .cn spam. This was due to changes in the domain registration process introduced by CNNIC. In the first week of February, the .cn spam volume fell further and fluctuated between 0 and 4 percent of total URL spam. Another interesting trend was observed during this period. On January 21 the volume of spam containing the .ru top-level domain (TLD) spiked up to 9 percent, and rose further up to close to 40 percent on February 8. Upon closer analysis, it was observed that the .cn domains used in the health spam attacks had been replaced with .ru domains. ...

The popularity of online auctions paves way for the development of online auction marketing tools. These tools are software applications that are intended to facilitate the sellers’ side of popular online auction websites. Some of the tools that help sellers in auctions are: image hosting to display galleries of their products, listing of best bidders in a single template, automatic inventory systems to notify sellers during low stocks, etc. With the help of these tools, online auctions are easier and time saving. ...

I saw something quite funny when checking out the spam feeds the other day. An attachment kept appearing, once in a while, with a name of Christmas Card.zip. It was making sporadic appearances in the feeds (and the number of spam email messages was quite low), but there were a couple of these odd messages at equally odd hours of the day: The email message itself was a run-of-the-mill electronic greeting card with an HTML body containing a nice Flash animation—the Flash animation actually comes from a legitimate source (123greetings.com). The email body contains a message asking the user to open the attachment to see who sent the email. Of course, opening the attachment yields a malicious file. The name of the file inside is _**Christmas Card.htm[MANY SPACES].exe **_and it is already detected by Symantec as W32.Ackantta.G@mm. ...

In the last two days our lab has detected a flood of email messages that seem to have been sent by the Facebook team urging users to submit a new account agreement. We’ve seen around 16,000 since yesterday. The subject of the message is UPDATED ACCOUNT AGREEMENT and the attached file is called AGREEMENT.ZIP. The message is like the following: Users are required to submit a new account agreement before a certain date. If not, their Facebook account will be restricted. The message also contains detailed instructions on how to do it. ...