TechBlog

You’d think that a company trying to raise several hundred million with an initial public offering of stock would tell their affiliates to be on their best behavior for a while. For example, maybe they’d discourage them from hacking government web sites to attract search engine hits on the word “bestiality,” then redirect browsers to the company’s site. The sites: The code: ...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission today announced that next Tuesday they will hold a news conference to make public details of “a law enforcement sweep cracking down on job and work-at-home fraud fueled by the economic downturn.” The media advisory said that the news conference would feature the director of the FTC’s bureau of Consumer Protection David C. Vladeck, an assistant attorney general and the Ohio Attorney General. The advisory listed as “also attending” representatives of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Monster.com and Microsoft. ...

Today we received some job hiring emails that looked like this: It has been formatted nicely and appears to have come from a large job search website. The message reads as follows: Dear Job Seeker, Upon reviewing your resume on Careerbuilder.com we have decided to offer you a job opportunity with our company. The job position is for a Payment Manager/Payments Processor in your area with no obligation to relocate. ...

Wired magazine has run a story on a phishing scam in Europe, New Zealand and Japan that resulted in the loss of 250,000 carbon credit permits worth $4 million from six companies. The phishing emails spoofed the German Emissions Trading Authority and said that the victim companies needed to re-register their accounts with the authority. When victims entered their information on a fraudulent web page from the link in the phishing emails the scammers accessed their accounts, transferred emissions credits to accounts they controlled then sold them. The amount the scammers made hasn’t been disclosed. ...

Facebook started rolling out a new home page and navigation menus earlier today. And whenever Facebook adds new features, in this case the Applications and Games dashboards, there’s usually a new privacy setting as well. This is what part of the new Applications dashboard looks like. All Facebook has raised some privacy concerns regarding the dashboard’s output. Do you really want all of your “friends” to know what applications you’ve been running? ...

This is really bad for so many reasons. It certainly doesn’t help their security. And yes, it’s completely legitimate.

Mozilla yesterday posted a notice on its AMO blog (that’s an acronym for their add-on site addons.mozilla.org) that two add-ons have been found infected with Trojan code: Sothink Web Video Downloader v. 4.0 and all versions of Master Filer. Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader contained Win32.LdPinch.gen and Master Filer contained Win32.Bifrose. According to the blog, Masterfiler was downloaded 600 times before it was removed from the site Jan. 25 and Sothink was downloaded more than 4,000 times before it was removed Feb. 2. ...

Found this little gem today. It’s distributed with other malware, cracks and drive-by downloads. It purports to be a security warning from your Windows operating system. Notice the “Visa, MasterCard, etc” – it doesn’t even bother to list all the cards it accepts. The really cool thing about it is that it takes FAKE credit card numbers as well as real ones!

Sami, one of our test engineers, was recently seeking a Play Station 3. He found this offer at Huuto.net, a Finnish auction site. 160€ for a 60GB unit, with games, not bad. Sami wanted to confirm that the seller was legit, so he requested a picture, and received this. When he examined the image properties, he discovered that the picture was taken in 2008. ...

With virus and spam outbreaks, analysts needs to keep their nerves to analyze the situation and proceed to deal with the new threat. So, I wasn’t expected to be surprised by my friends’ actions on facebook this past weekend. It started innocently enough, as a post about getting a Free $25 Starbucks gift card for joining a particular group. The first person to join the group from my friends list happens to work for a non-profit organization helping young people. So, I expected the young people on his “friends list” to join this group shortly. ...