TechBlog

It’s time for your daily dose of “spot the fake program / avoid the fake program”. What is it this time? Well, if you have family members who are into webcams and chatting you might want to point them to this writeup because a new challenger has entered the ring: Yes, “Chat Cam” is a rather smart looking (and entirely fake) program designed to make end users think they’re taking part in a large community of webcam owners. Clearly, the creator had the recently launched Chatroulette in mind when they made this one (if you’re not familiar with it, Chatroulette is a site where you jump from webcam chat to webcam chat over and over again, all within one large community of strangers. In practice, you tend to mash the “Next” button endlessly as one “chat” after another fails to materialise). This is what Chatroulette looks like – you’ll notice the similarity as we move further into the writeup: ...

It’s been over a year since we first started seeing the familiar Windows XP My Computer page where it appears your drives are being scanned and it reports a bunch of non-existent malware on your computer. Yesterday I was investigating the latest hot news item where there was a FAMU (Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University) sex tape released on the internet and sure enough I found many SEO poisoned links claiming to have the video. Imagine my surprise when I saw the following. ...

Symantec has been observing several spam and phishing attacks regarding the recent Valentine’s Day. One such phishing attack was on an e-card website that asked for user credentials in order to send Valentine’s Day greetings to loved ones. The legitimate e-card website has partnerships with several other brands and so accepts credentials from certain other websites as well. Hence, attackers can steal user information from several brands’ sites by phishing on just one e-card website. This particular attack asked for users’ credentials for a popular information services website. The phishing domain was hosted on servers in China and has been reported as “domain tasting.” Domain tasting is a situation in which a domain name is used for a small period of time and is checked to see if it is making enough money. If it doesn’t earn enough, the domain name is deleted and the registrant is refunded the entire registration fee. This is a technique used by attackers to perform phishing activity for small periods of time at low costs. ...

Readers may well have read some of the news stories posted after yesterday’s news concerning the take down of the “Mariposa” botnet. So what is Mariposa? Mariposa is the name given to a particular botnet that started getting some attention during the first half of 2009. The botnet was dubbed Mariposa thanks to the name of one of the C&C servers that is used: butterfly dot sinip dot es since Mariposa is the Spanish word for butterfly. ...

Microsoft has released new spring theme for windows 7 to bring the feeling of season change right on your desktop. It is named Czech and is a light, simple and beautiful theme with eight eye catching nature wallpapers. Just download the theme and double click on it to apply. After applying the theme you can customize and tune color scheme according to your choice. Download: Czech Spring Theme

How many sites do you log into? Bank, email, shopping, work tools, social networks — each one wants a password, and serious sites add rules about length or character types. You already know not to use the same password everywhere. Recycling variants (david1, david2, david3) is not much better: one leak still maps to the rest. For what weak choices look like in the wild, see Passwords used by the Conficker worm. ...

The battle over RealNetworks’ DVD copying software, called RealDVD, has finally come to a close, and Real has lost. Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the United States District Court, Northern District of California ruled today in favor of the DVD Copy Control Association, who argued that RealDVD actually made illegal copies that violated the Content Scramble System (CSS) license agreement. The case began in late 2008 when RealDVD was only a couple of weeks old. RealNetworks preemptively sued the DVD Copy Control Association for the right to copy DVDs, using a previous case (DVD CCA v. Kaleidescape Inc.) as a hopeful legal precedent. ...

“…in that space one can easily indulge in depravity, lies, vulgarity…” Here’s a sort of comment about the Internet that you don’t see much in the news. The Russian government news service RiaNovosti is reporting that Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia (head of the Russian Orthodox Church), told school students in Moscow that “Nowadays the Internet is a kind of laboratory where an individual should be formed and where a character should be sharpened.” ...

The U.S. Census Bureau is warning of phishing and other scams that are using the 2010 Census as bait. Here is the warning from the bureau’s web site: If you are contacted for any of the following reasons — Do Not Participate. It is NOT the U.S. Census Bureau. Phishing: ‘Phishing’ is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, social security numbers, bank account or credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out by email and it often directs users to enter sensitive information at a fake web site whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one. ...

Right! A site registered in the state of “Taliban.” You’re really going to go to a site with this registration: Nice work SANS. Thanks to Daniel Wesemann at SANS: http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=8350

Microsoft Vice President of Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney, in a keynote address at the RSA security conference in San Francisco yesterday, called for quarantines on malware-infected PCs. His remarks were widely covered by a variety of web news outlets. He compared the threat from infected PCs with the threat from smokers in public places and resulting bans on smoking because of second-hand smoke: “You have a right to infect and give yourself illness. You don’t have the right to infect your neighbor. Computers are the same way.” Charney didn’t discuss specific techniques. ...

Remember Microsoft’s action against 277 Waledac domains last week? Well, that’s one way of going after a botnet… Another way of shutting down a botnet? Arrest the botmasters! Three Spanish citizens have been arrested for running the “Mariposa” botnet. The three reportedly have no criminal records and have limited hacking skills. Mariposa is a Butterfly Kit based botnet, and the kit is no longer for sale. Details are available from the BBC and The Register. Kudos to those involved in the arrests.

Want a place to check the legitimacy of a charity? “Founded in 2001, Charity Navigator has become the nation’s largest and most-utilized evaluator of charities. In our quest to help donors, our team of professional analysts has examined tens of thousands of non-profit financial documents. As a result, we know as much about the true fiscal operations of charities as anyone. We’ve used this knowledge to develop an unbiased, objective, numbers-based rating system to assess the financial health of over 5,000 of America’s best-known charities.” ...

In the same way that media event X guarantees Rogue Antispyware Y, a new and highly anticipated videogame that’s about ready to launch will similarly bring out the scams and fakes. If you have any family members that like their PC games but perhaps aren’t clued up on their Internet fakeouts, you might want to warn them that no matter how cool the so-called “Battlefield: Bad Company 2” keygens look, they should steer clear: ...

It won’t work if you have a rootkit infection, but it won’t blue screen your machine either. Microsoft has reissued Security Bulletin MS010-15 from last month to work around a problem that had occurred when a WinXP user attempted to install the patch on a machine that was infected with a rootkit. (blue screen, blue screen) Jerry Bryant, Microsoft’s senior security communications manager lead, writing on the company TechNet blog said that the new installation packages for MS10-015 have new logic that will prevent the security update from installing on rootkit-infected systems. Microsoft also is offering guidance for those with infected machines and a scanning tool that can detect system conditions that will prevent the patch from applying itself. ...