Advice

The number for the rest of the world might be 26 percent There is a story making headlines on the computer security news sources today about estimates that 4.4 percent of Chinese Internet users have no anti-virus software, up from 3.9 percent last year. That’s about 17 million machines. The numbers came from surveying by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) and China’s National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team (CNCERT). ...

I’m almost certain this shouldn’t be on the Nokia.de webspace, lurking under the “online.nokia.de” subdomain: Don’t worry though, Admin – they “just changed your index”. This isn’t the first time Nokia domains have come under attack. The above defacement – by an Albanian hacker called “Spammer” – seems eager to let the webmaster know they can help with the bugs, but I’m pretty sure an email would have been just as useful. Nokia.de have been notified of the defacement, but I’ve had no word back as of yet. ...

Don’t run your PC with admin privileges Sometimes in life you know something is a risk, but you don’t know how BIG a risk it is until somebody actually checks it out. There was a German scientist in Russia who repeated Ben Franklin’s kite-in-the-thunder-storm experiment but didn’t live to write up his results. Los Angeles security firm BeyondTrust has released an analysis of Microsoft’s 75 security bulletins last year. They came to the startling conclusion that if users had operated their computers without administrative rights they would have eliminated 64 percent of their risk from Microsoft vulnerabilities! ...

Who wouldn’t want some tax benefits in the current economic times? Don’t phishers and scammers know that all too well! In a new phishing scheme, We found that Child Tax Credit is being used as bait to lure parents to disclose their financial data. This attack specifically tries to convince users to make claims for credit and lower their tax burden by using their children’s education expenses. According to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) website [PDF], taxpayers may be able to reduce their federal income tax by up to $1,000 for each qualifying child. Making use of this information, spam email discusses the expensive education of children and quickly advises recipients to use this expense to make claims for tax credits under the numerous tax benefits provided by the IRS. They make a further appeal that as a U.S. citizen or resident, recipients should apply for their tax returns. According to the email, users can get a tax refund of $75,000 for their children’s education. To apply for a refund, users need to complete a form attached to the email message. The fraudulent email has an HTML attachment named “#1924819299.pdf.htm”. ...

In the security industry we often focus heavily on new technologies and shiny new software, and forget that so much of what we see is dependent on the person behind the computer. Today, a co-worker of mine was sent an email from someone she doesn’t know, with the following text: “I’m writing this with tears in my eyes,my fam and I came down here to Wales,United Kingdom for a short vacation unfortunately we were mugged at the park of the hotel where we stayed,all cash,credit card and cell were stolen off us but luckily for us we still have our passports with us. ...

Mozilla Foundation has released version 3.6.2 of its Firefox browser a week early. The group had said the update would be available March 30. The update fixes a widely reported vulnerability (CVE-2010-1028) that prompted Germany’s CERT to advise Web users to switch to another browser until a fix was made. (My blog post “Germany’s CERT warns against Firefox use” ) ...

Älypää, a popular Finnish game and quiz site, announced a database breach late last night. Over 127,000 account names and passwords were leaked. The site has currently suspended access and doesn’t maintain any personal details but Älypää users should determine whether or not they recycle their passwords elsewhere. If so, those accounts are at risk of being hacked. ...

Most of us are familiar with how high profile news events are used for malware distribution. We’ve seen it many times such as with Tiger Woods’ scandal and the earthquake in Haiti. Now the recent earthquake in Chile is used to prey upon unsuspecting folks interested in what’s going on with the post-quake and tsunami. This shows we should really be careful in our choices of where we go to get information. Try any related search term or phrase related to “Chile Earthquake”, “Tsunami”, etc. I’ve done so and will walk us through a few examples of risky to malicious content that my search turned up. This type of malware distribution tends to target the broadest audience possible, so I entered the search term “Chile” and then let Google auto-complete my search to “Chile quake 2010 tsunami” to load what is a popular search phrase. Almost immediately, among some recognizable news site results are random blog posts touting words like “download” or “.exe”. We should be suspicious of these. ...

Exploit code for the the zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer has been added to the Metasploit framework. According to an email HD Moore wrote to ZDNet’s Ryan Naraine, the exploit works quite reliable – successful 50% of the times on Windows XP with SP2 and SP3 with IE7 and deactivated Data Execution Prevention (DEP). The security hole got reported yesterday on Microsoft’s March 2010 Patch Tuesday. Drive-by-Download-Exploits are likely to appear now as the Metasploit framework is open source and the exploit can now be abused even by script kiddies. Time to change the default browser – Microsoft just released a new browser choice screen which allows for exactly that! ...

A Windows Update is available to users who are located in member countries of the European Union allowing for choosing a different standard browser for the system. The update is available for download through Windows Update. The Update creates a shortcut on your desktop. This shortcut leads to a Web page in which it is possible to select which Web browser to install. Additionally, the first time the users logs in to the computer after installing the update, Windows Internet Explorer starts automatically and displays the Browser Choice Web page. ...