TechBlog

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.” ...