TechBlog

I am a very lucky guy. In fact, I must be the luckiest person in the world since spammers like to send all kinds of lucky spam to me. These days, I get inundated with lucky spam. The last spam I had, I got offered a free gift card if I purchased some Viagra from them. Wow. On other days, asking me to lose my weight results in instant chances of winning a lottery at the same time and all of this is due to my lucky email address. ...

Adobe Flash is a well well known plugin used today by most of the internet users. Its next upgrade i.e version 10.1 will get private browsing support. Flash player will now automatically clean all flash history of your computer once you end the session. It will use the same technique as used in browsers supporting private browsing. As you end the session the browsers in private mode automatically clears cookies, history and data, similarly flash will also remove any user password, login information or data stored that were associated while working in flash environment. ...

False images from Cosmopolitan infect computers with fake antivirus product BitDefender today warned of a new threat following the flood of interest in the result of the January 19th Massachusetts elections. The day after his winning Senate campaign, nude pictures of Cosmopolitan’s Sexiest Man of 1982 Scott Brown not only stirred women’s imaginations, but also got the interest of malware creators. The latter exploited the news to spread a fake antivirus: Trojan.FakeAV.XP. Instead of spicy pictures, the targeted user received messages of false infections on their computer and prompts to buy a fake antivirus product. ...

Some questionable sites associated with the Winigard family of rogue security products pulls it from this location, which appears to belong to a graphic designer in Canada. It’s funny and here’s waaaay too much truth there:

Symantec Security Response has repeatedly warned that looking for free movies and videos online often results in malware infection, and here we go again with yet another example. We recently became aware of a campaign, centered around the YouTube Web site, to trick users into following malicious links. YouTube is one of the most popular video sharing sites and therefore is often picked by online criminals hoping for an easy catch. Performing a search using a (generally female) celebrity’s name followed by “sex tape” or a recent movie name yields results such as the following: ...

This week we’ve seen a spam campaign aimed at separating unsuspecting users from their iPhone details. Messages have the subject “IMPORTANT: Your iPhone Warranty Extension for 1 Year!”, pretend to be sent from “[email protected]”, and look as follows (click to enlarge the image): Recipients who feel like they can’t let this limited-time too-good-to-be-true special offer pass them by will find themselves redirected to the following page: ...

But don’t. Please don’t!… just…. don’t!… Instead, why don’t you apply the out-of-band patch ( MS10-002 ) that Microsoft has just released…?!!! Patching remote-code-execution vulnerabilities is usually “a good idea” to say the least. But, considering that: Microsoft rushed to get this patch out…… ( Thank you Microsoft! ) And that, this patch addresses several Internet Explorer vulnerabilities – of which includes CVE-2010-0249 – the infamous “Aurora attacks” related vulnerability that’s well known to be making the rounds in the wild. ...

I dislike salesmen. The look on their faces irks me when I can feel the dollars flicking in their eyes. I hate it when my car insurance company ask if i want to get home insurance as well. I do not like it when my credit card company tries to sell me a great new insurance product. In general, I hate to be a victim of cross selling. Malware authors are just like salesmen. They cross-sell as well. A fake AV tried to do the same to me. Besides offering great AV protection, it wants me to get some useful codecs so that I can watch all my legit DVDrips. Thus, someone decided that in order to get me to install their codecs, he/she will have to terminate all processes related to media players. ...

APcSecure is a new rogue from the WiniGuard clone factory.

The Danwei web site (Chinese media, advertising, and urban life) is carrying a rippingly funny blog piece by Alice Xin Liu about a recent Chinese government program that would have China Mobile monitor mobile telephone text transmissions for conversations of a sexual nature. Offenders’ (messaging) service would be cut off until they wrote a “self-criticism.” Xin Lilu said bloggers in China are having a ball with the idea that the government is trying to censor dirty jokes, which apparently are a significant part of the culture of Chinese people (as if they were any different than the rest of us). ...