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A friend of mine forwarded a suspicious email message recently. I’ve replaced the domain, order number, etc. below: I validated for my friend that the email was bogus. The domain was not held by Domain Registry of America (DROA), and never had been. The domain was not expiring in the next 90 days. Later he received a follow-up email: The scam attempts to get domain holders to transfer service and pay accordingly. It seems this scam has been around for at least eight years, though it has morphed over time. Apparently the DROA has chosen to test the 2003 judgment by the Federal Trade Commission (http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2003/12/domainreg.shtm). One thing of interest here is the two-staged approach: The first message requires no action by the recipient, but the second message tells the user to obtain and hand over the keys to the castle.

There are a couple of programs in circulation at the moment designed to steal Steam account login credentials. People can have a lot of money invested in Steam purchases (if you purchase PC games online Steam is probably the best digital delivery service around), and it isn’t really the greatest thing in the world to have one stolen. Steam is a popular thing to have in webcafes, and the company behind it actually support this in a very big way. These particular infection files would cause the most trouble on the networks of netcafes with minimal security in place, allowing chancers to install files with a USB stick, let the stealer grab account logins then come back later to collect the passwords. ...

One our researchers was reading the comments about Dancing With The Stars, and Kate Gosselin’s performance (He’s a huge fan … don’t ask), when he noticed a link to a URL shortening service. Given that it was advertising a video of Kate Gosselin topless, he astutely realised that was a bit suspicious, and checked it out inside a nice, safe virtual pc. Indeed, the shortening service immediately transferred to a website showing a picture of Kate at the beach… ...

Facebook is, by its nature, a social experience. But as the undisputed king of social networking expands ways for its users to interact, it’s raising more questions about how much of their information is made available to people they don’t know. In some cases, users may not even realize it’s happening. One example is the hundreds of thousands of developers approved by Facebook to create games, quizzes and other applications. Some of those developers are able to access basic information about users after a Facebook friend has started using their application. ...

When it is not actually a picture but an obfuscated malicious VB script! That’s the story with W32/VBSAuto-F — yet another autorun worm that sets a number of self-starting registry entries, spreads via USB drives, and downloads further malware. The worm embeds code in a JPEG comment field of an ambiguously named file “image.jpg” or “imwin.jpg”. Previewing such files as images remains innocuous, as picture viewers tend not to execute meta data by default. This is unfortunately not the case when the file is run through the VB script engine, which is happy to interpret the same JPEG comment 0xFFFE header bytes to indicate Little-Endian UTF-16 encoded data and execute the remaining portion of the file as code. ...

The number for the rest of the world might be 26 percent There is a story making headlines on the computer security news sources today about estimates that 4.4 percent of Chinese Internet users have no anti-virus software, up from 3.9 percent last year. That’s about 17 million machines. The numbers came from surveying by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) and China’s National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team (CNCERT). ...

New Scientist is reporting that a massive database culled from the public profiles of 210 million Facebook users has been destroyed before its anticipated — and controversial — release to researchers. Pete Warden, a former Apple engineer, reluctantly deleted the data after Facebook threatened legal action, saying he could not afford to fight a lawsuit. He said Facebook was not aware that such information was available and that the flaw is being patched. ...

Scum on the run Security blogger Brian Krebs is reporting some good numbers that show spammers are no longer registering their domains in China (.cn) since that country started requiring actual on-paper registrations and business licenses, which precludes anonymous registration. AND their new top-level domain of choice, Russia (.ru), is going to make life for sca/spammers difficult there. “Russia’s Coordination Center for domain registration will require individuals and businesses applying for a .ru address to provide a copy of a passport or legal registration papers.” Krebs wrote. ...

Tom Gallagher, senior security test lead with Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, was extensively quoted in news stories today as he described how his group found 1,800 software flaws in Office 2010 by running millions of “fuzzing” tests. According to ComputerWorld, “Microsoft was able to find such a large number of bugs in Office 2010 by using not only machines in the company’s labs, but also under-utilitized or idle PCs throughout the company. The concept isn’t new: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI@home) project may have been the first to popularize the practice, and remains the largest, but it’s also been used to crunch numbers in medical research and to find the world’s largest prime number. ...