TechBlog

Popular instant messaging, voice chat, and video conferencing client Skype and Skype Lite are no longer available on Windows Mobile devices. The company says, “We’ve chosen to withdraw Skype Lite and Skype for Windows Mobile because we want to offer our new customers an improved mobile experience — much like the version that has proved so popular on the iPhone, and which is now available on Symbian phones. Our focus is on providing a rich user experience that allows you to enjoy free Skype-to-Skype and low cost calls as easily on the move as you do at your desktop. We felt that Skype Lite and Skype for Windows Mobile were not offering the best possible Skype experience.“ ...

Very funny: The story starts with an guy insulting everyone on the IRC channel. Most people there believed it was rather funny, but it got even more funny. For information: The dangerous hacker is called bitchchecker and the one being hacked and original author of the comments, who is talking here, is known as Elch. 127.0.0.1 is always the IP-adress of the computer you’re currently using, any request there will return to your computer. ...

In Additional to my last post: http://boelectronic.blogspot.com/2010/03/twitter-phished-its-easy-mistake.html We’ve received some questions regarding recent phishing attacks conducted against Twitter.com. Tweets and Direct Messages (DM) containing phases such as “This you??” or “LOL is this you” are linking victims towards a Twitter login phishing page. If the bait is taken and victim enters their password, Twitter’s infamous “fail whale” is displayed and the user is returned to their account. They might not even realize that their account details have been compromised. ...

London, England (CNN) — Twitter this week endured a number of “phishing” attacks, in which some users unwittingly gave out their passwords to malicious sites. Haven’t we all learned to keep our passwords to ourselves, you ask_?_ Perhaps. But the truth is we’re all vulnerable to social engineering, and two major Web trends are creating further confusion for new Internet users. The anatomy of these attacks is simple: You receive a message, seemingly from a friend on a social network. The message contains a link and some strong incentive to click it — in the case of the most recent Twitter attack, the note simply asks “This You????.” When you click the link, you’re prompted to log in again to view the page. ...

In Additional to my last Post: http://boelectronic.blogspot.com/2010/03/free-fakeav-at-virus-total-thats-not.html VirusTotal.com [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirusTotal.com] is a brilliant site that helps both public and researchers alike determine if an executable file they have is potentially malicious or not. Julio Canto (of VirusTotal fame) has noticed that somebody decided to cash in on the good name of the site with the following domain: virus-total(dot)in Go there, and you’ll see a message claiming the site is a “free online antivirus scanning service, click SCAN to begin scanning:“ ...

It’s been ten years already; can you believe it? I’m talking about the U.S. Census. It’s been ten years since the last one. Time to do it again. No, it wasn’t on my calendar either. To remind all of us and to encourage us to participate, the U.S. Census Bureau is spending $340 million to get the word out. There was even a Super Bowl ad. The Census Bureau will not be the only ones trying to get our attention and encouraging us to help them collect data. Cybercriminals will be doing the same thing. But they’ll be trying to fool us into thinking they are the Census Bureau. And the data they’ll be collecting will be a little different. It will be personal information they can use to rip us off. ...

There were a couple of news items that I thought were interesting enough, albeit unrelated, to comment on. The first (story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8537771.stm) is that Microsoft has taken legal action to shut down the Waldec botnet, and folks are divided about whether there was any point to it. While I don’t expect it to cause any noticeable lessening of spam, I’m pleased that they did it. Spam-sending is a business, after all, and if you can create a situation where it costs more to run it than they are making, then they might actually stop. After all, if your outgo exceeds your income, then your upkeep becomes your downfall. ...

If history is any gauge, this is probably the first of several incidents like this. The Register – which is worth reading twice a day for its insanely funny headlines if nothing else – is reporting that a hacker (hacktivist?), possibly British, who goes by the handle Neo, has gotten his hands on tax documents for about 1,000 companies and is tweeting the salaries of Latvian bank managers and other execs to Latvian TV. ...

VirusTotal has been well known to most readers of the blog. It’s a free virus and malware online scan service which allows submitters to test a particular file against a multitude of malware scanners. So, it’s not highly surprising that malware authors would try to use that name to further their gain. Today we came across such a sample arriving at one of our spamtraps through a car-related forum. The message looks like this: ...

Are malware authors and spammers suffering from the same affliction of “word salad“, or are they perhaps devoted students of Afringlish? Why else would one combine random words in an attempt to look legitimate? The reason is a simple one – not only are humans good at associating meaning to names, they are also exceptionally good at filling in the blanks, while machines are not. Thus, by carefully selecting particular names for insertion into the version information of malware samples, such as those of reputable software houses, the authors attempt to exploit this human condition. Presumably, they also hope to bypass security scanners which approve files based on such superficial attributes. ...