TechBlog

There is a well-respected and very useful site that everyone in the anti-virus industry uses – sometimes several times a day: Virus Total. You can upload suspicious files or their check sums to Virus Total to see if a file is malicious. The makers of a new rogue have picked up on the Virus Total name in an effort to make their malicious creation look like something legitimate: What it tries to download is detected as FraudTool.Win32.FakeRean (fs). Here’s what the real Virus Total site looks like. It basically runs your code sample or check sum against 41 anti-virus engines and displays the resulting detections. ...

Alert reader Joe Fernandez over at the MalwareUp forum (http://malwareup.org) sent us a tip on this one. He was checking out the scripting in a rogue security product and found a little note to the guys at ESET anti-virus company (which makes ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4 referred to below): Cute!

A Facebook malware attack is on the loose this weekend, enticing users to click a “Distracting Beach Babes” video on their Facebook Walls. The Wall message reads: “this is hilarious! lol 😛 😛 😛 Distracting Beach Babes [HQ] Length: 5:32″. If you see this video on Facebook today, do not click the link: Doing so, and downloading a linked file, will result in malware being installed on your computer. ...

There’s a new Facebook worm out there. However, it doesn’t seem to be doing anything else than posting a message to people’s Facebook walls. The message that the worm posts is “try not to laugh xD http://www.fbhole. com/omg/allow.php?s=a&r=[random number]“ If you follow the link, you end up to a page looking like this: The page shows a fake error message. If you click anywhere on the page, you will trigger a script that will try to post the same message to your Facebook wall. This is done with an invisible iframe that follows your mouse around – causing you to click on an invisible “publish” button. In addition of the wall message post, nothing else happens. ...

The Phoenix New Times has reported that the CEO of LifeLock ID theft protection service of Tempe, Ariz., has had his identity used by rip-off artists 13 times since 2007. CEO Todd Davis advertised his social security number publically to assure customers that his service could protect their identity. The service cost $10-15 per month. In March we blogged the story when the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and LifeLock reached a settlement in which the company would pay $12 million – $11 million of which would be refunded to consumers – for fraud. ...

Hewlett-Packard has announced it has expanded the May 14, 2009, recall of its laptop battery packs. The company will replace the defective batteries at no cost to customers. The notice on the HP site said “HP and the battery manufacturers believe that certain battery packs shipped in HP notebook PC products manufactured between August 2007 and May 2008 may pose a potential safety hazard to customers. The batteries can overheat, posing a fire and burn hazard. ...

On the 2nd day at Google I/O 2010 developer event, Google has announced Android 2.2 with Flash along with Google TV, a new technology for television and Internet freaks. Watch the Introducing Google TV video below:

If you’ve been squeezing the last bit of value out of that installation of Windows XP Service Pack 2 or are continuing to run it because of proprietary software that you’re squeezing the last bit of value out of, well, you only have two more months of squeezing. Microsoft will end support for Service Pack 2 on July 13. Now if you can somehow upgrade to Service Pack 3, you can forget about the problem until Microsoft’s Extended Support for XP ends April 8, 2014, assuming the hard drive in that PC you bought in 2001 lasts that long. Meanwhile, I wouldn’t slack off on the backups. ...

Yesterday, the Pirate Bay went down following pressure from the RIAA, which threatened to slap TPB’s hosting provider with huge fines. We predicted The Pirate Bay’s downfall ages ago, but it still hasn’t happened. Things have been looking grim for the file-sharing service for a while. First, there was the lawsuit from the entertainment industry that left the Pirate Bay’s team scattered and struggling to stay the course it charted for itself. Then the news that the entire service was to be sold (the sale never happened) to a Swedish Gaming Company seemed to have scattered the Pirate Bay’s fans, too. ...

Google announced today that it has made a cash offer to acquire Global IP Solutions (GIPS). A leader in the real-time VoIP processing space for both voice and video, GIPS doesn’t have any consumer-facing products; instead, it provides services that work on the backend for products like Yahoo! Messenger, Citrix and WebEx. This is an interesting acquisition for Google, who already has a number of consumer products that could benefit from GIPS technologies. Not only does GIPS provide voice processing for VoIP calls that could potentially improve gTalk and Google Voice, GIPS also has a large focus on real-time video transmissions, both on the client and mobile side. Our first thought when looking at this announcement was that Google could provide some really formidable competition to Skype. ...