Advice

I don’t believe it!! This morning I’ve received an email sent by Google notifying me that I´ve won $950,000, so I think this will be the last post I’m going to write 😉 Well, I haven’t taken part in any promotion of this kind and I’ve never heard that Google gives prizes just like that, but I can consider it as if I won the lottery. Here you have the content of the message: ...

The Indian Premier League 2010 is a huge attraction for the cricket-crazy population in India. These matches are packed with all the ingredients to entertain, and are capable of satisfying viewers’ hunger for more and more cricket matches. People are ready to buy tickets in all possible ways just to watch their local and international cricket stars play. Symantec was anticipating a spamming campaign against ticket sales during the initial period of the sporting extravaganza; however, it is just halfway through the event and still not too late to lure email users with offers related to IPL tickets. ...

Farmville has been launch in June 2009 and after month it has been rated at #8 in Top 25 Facebook Games. Farmville has become the most popular games on Facebook. It has been rank at #1 Facebook Game on August 2009 up until now. Farmville users can’t get enough of farming. They make impressive hay bales art farm just like the Image below. Fake AV gang launches its attack to the Farmville users by poisoning Yahoo and Google search results using the following keywords (see Image 1): ...

A blog contributor who goes by the name of “jeremy” has continued to research the possibilities inherent in the recently discovered .pdf-file weakness that could enable the execution of code. Jeremy posted earlier this week that he had created a proof of concept .pdf file that could spread to other .pdf files on a system or network (which makes it a worm). “Within the proof of concept I infected a single benign PDF file from another PDF file, but this proof of concept could easily be modified to recursively traverse a users computer directories to find and infect all PDF files on that users computer and/or accessible to that user at the time of execution with any payload of my choosing.” He wrote on the SudoSecure.net site. ...

Google has released a new video aimed at teens about making Google Buzz a safer experience. The video was released in conjunction with the new Buzz privacy reset issued yesterday. This new focus on privacy and privacy options comes amidst class-action lawsuits and a request for FTC investigation regarding the service’s launch and explanation to consumers. Although aimed at teens, the tips are good for anyone using Buzz to keep in mind. ...

Virus Bulletin is reporting that a recent survey it conducted found that about one out of five people are still using the dangerously-out-of-date version six of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. There are probably a number of reasons for this: — They are using IE6 at work with legacy systems that require IE6 (or IT never got around to updating the company’s browsers.) — They are using IE6 at home and don’t know that IE6 is frighteningly insecure. — They are using IE6 at home and don’t know that there is such a thing as an update to browser software. — They are using IE6 at home and don’t know there is such a thing as computer security. ...

The Inquirer security news site were reporting that the 25-year-old arrested by French police for hacking a Twitter data base and accessing U.S. President Barak Obama’s account guessed the admin’s password. The unemployed man, who went by the handle “Hacker Croll.” is not a genius, the news site concluded. “Apparently it was a doddle to do. He simply guessed people’s passwords by working them out from information on their blogs or online pages they had created about themselves,” it said. ...

Malware authors use numerous unconventional techniques in their attempts to create malicious code that is not detected by antivirus software. As malicious code analysts, though, it is our job to analyze their creations, and as such we have to be constantly vigilant for the latest tricks that the malware authors employ. While looking at some PDFs yesterday, something suspicious caught my eye. The PDF file format supports compression and encoding of embedded data, and also allows multiple cascading filters to be specified so that multi-level compression and encoding of that data is possible. The PDF stream filters usually look something like this: ...

Despite the global economic slowdown, India witnessed a high number of new jobs in the country during the first quarter of 2010. With the job market looking positive, job sites seem to have benefited with more users accessing their websites. Below is a screenshot of a phishing website that takes advantage of the brand of a popular Indian job site: The increased number of candidates seeking jobs in India has led to the launch of phishing attacks on Indian job sites. The phishing page in the above example is asking for potential employers’ login credentials. The phishing website was created on servers located in the Netherlands. The credentials consist of a username and password as well as the employer’s email ID and password. After stealing these credentials, fraudsters send targeted spam messages to the employers. The spam message states that the employer is required to pay an amount to upgrade or continue his access of particular recruitment solutions. The link provided to make the payment leads to a phishing page that asks for confidential information such as credit card numbers, pin number, etc. Attackers also masquerade as the employer to send spam containing fake job opportunities to job seeking candidates—an action that means the attackers are always seeking financial gain. ...

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… ...