TechBlog

This could save your LIFE!

Published: August 29, 2010 Reading time: 4 min

The following internet advice which may have a subject title such as above could just get you killed. Like any other middle aged, balding, over-weight chap my mother still worries about me. So when her friend sent this to her and many other people, she forwarded it to me first:- Just in case!!! Let’s say it’s 6.15pm and you’re going home (alone of course), after an unusually hard day on the job. ...

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Malicious warez site offers Firefox 4.0 beta download scam

Published: August 29, 2010 Reading time: 1 min

Like a lot of seedy stuff, this started with a Twitter post:. The current working version of Mozilla’s Firefox browser is 3.6.8. Version 4 is in beta testing. You get them FREE from Mozilla.. Why would you need a crack (program with its password broken) or a keygen (application that generates a password for a password-protected program) for something that is FREE? Well, there’s a sucker born every minute and the folks at this warez (pirated software) site are betting there are a lot of them using Twitter. ...

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The bad guys are going after the Pirates

Published: August 29, 2010 Reading time: 1 min

File-sharing organization Pirate Bay has been controversial for a long time, like maybe the length of its entire existence. It’s been in the news recently because a number of governments are trying to shut it down. That’s a situation ripe for social engineering. We found this scheme this morning: a number of typo-squatting sites carrying the following. (Note: the REAL Pirate Bay site is thepiratebay.org.) What would lead a victim to this? The phony site piratebay.com (below) comes up as the third result on a Google search for “piratebay” or fourth for “pirate bay.” ...

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Microsoft releases work-around tool for DLL loading vulnerability

Published: August 29, 2010 Reading time: 1 min

Microsoft has posted an advisory that explains the “DLL preloading attacks” and offers a work-around tool that “allows customers to disable the loading of libraries from remote network or WebDAV shares. This tool can be configured to disallow insecure loading on a per-application or a global system basis.” When an application loads a .dll file, but doesn’t name a full path name,Windows searches a pre-defined set of directories for it. Exploiting this, an intruder could social engineer a victim into loading a malicious .dll from a USB drive or from a network and execute arbitrary code. ...

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How to Get Hacked on Facebook

Published: August 29, 2010 Reading time: 2 min

One of the most common scenarios we observe on a daily basis are users coaxed into phishing campaigns and malicious applications on Facebook. As we interact with our friends and family on social networks, we tend to trust of any and all of the information that appears to be from our “trusted network.” However, Facebook is one of the most trolled social networks by cyber criminals. They are waiting for you to make a mistake and once you make it, they will be sure to hack you and exploit your friends trust through your newly hacked account. ...

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Facebook login phishing

Published: August 27, 2010 Reading time: 1 min

Here’s one of the latest Facebook phish attempts: videos of “beautifull” girls: It might look like the Facebook login page, but, check out the URL. I don’t think you want to log in to Facebook there.

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DLL Hijacking Evolved

Published: August 27, 2010 Reading time: 1 min

Back in November 2007, I’ve seen this technique used by one of the variant of Worm called W32/Drom. The technique was not to execute the malicious file or component of the worm but to prevent Antivirus Program from running. The Worm queries the following Antivirus registries to get the Installation Path, once acquired, it creates a folder named “ws2_32.dll” with Hidden and System attributes on that location. As I test this technique, it prevented the program from running as it first loads the “ws2_32.dll” folder in the current directory. ...

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Brand new 0-day Exploit. The world is going to end! Yet again…

Published: August 27, 2010 Reading time: 3 min

Sigh… The latest “exploit” that affects hundreds of programs and will be the end of the world as we currently know it is actually a well documented feature of Windows. It has actually been around since the DOS days. In the old days we used to call these Companion viruses. It worked by using a different file extension that will be executed before the real executable. For example if you had a “gwbasic.exe” you would create a “gwbasic.com” anywhere in the path and if the user just typed “gwbasic” he would execute the “gwbasic.com” and not the “gwbasic.exe”. If the author of the “gwbasic.com” was ‘nice’ he could execute the “gwbasic.exe” so as to make the existence of the “gwbasic.com” file harder to detect. ...

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Internet Explorer Turns 15

Published: August 16, 2010 Reading time: 2 min

Microsoft’s web browser Internet Explorer was launched 15 years ago. While it had its ups and downs over the years – version 6 was plagued by countless security issues, which made it one of the most hated browsers around – it’s still the most popular browser in the world, with the last couple of versions improving dramatically on their troubled predecessor. The first version of the browser, Internet Explorer 1, debuted on August 16, 1995. It was based on Mosaic, a web browser Microsoft had licensed from a company called Spyglass Inc. Starting with version 3.0, Microsoft started bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, increasing its market share dramatically and ultimately squeezing once dominant browser Netscape Navigator out of the market completely. ...

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Facebook Dislike button scam spreads virally

Published: August 16, 2010 Reading time: 2 min

Have you seen a message like this on Facebook? I just got the Dislike button, so now I can dislike all of your dumb posts lol!! If so, don’t click on the link. It’s the latest survey scam spreading virally across Facebook, using the tried-and-tested formula used in the past by other viral scams including “Justin Bieber trying to flirt”, “Student attacked his teacher and nearly killed him”, “the biggest and scariest snake” and the “world’s worst McDonald’s customer”. ...

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