AOL

Mashable: The AOL-Yahoo rumors are heating up once again. This time, they involve splitting up the AOL empire into two divisions before engaging in a merger of the two Internet companies. AOL has two main components: A content and display advertising business, and its longstanding dial-up business. In the past few years, AOL has focused on developing and expanding its advertising arm, its web portal and its media properties (e.g. Engadget and TechCrunch). ...

Take a look in the email I got from AOL: Hi! There are hundreds of millions of people of all ages using email across the globe today. And because communication is often very personal, we realize a one-size-fits-all solution isn’t always the right answer. So, while we’re proud of the AOL Mail that you know and love today, earlier this week we launched a new email product, code named: Project Phoenix. ...

Just two years after acquiring social network Bebo for $850 million, the newly-independent AOL has decided to abandon its social networking investment, either by selling it or simply shutting it down. According to PaidContent, AOL sent a message to employees earlier today stating that it “is not in a position” to support Bebo: “The strategy we set in May 2009 leverages our core strengths and scale in quality content, premium advertising and consumer applications, positioning us for the next phase of growth of the Internet. As we evaluate our portfolio of brands against our strategy, it is clear that social networking is a space with heavy competition, and where scale defines success. Bebo, unfortunately, is a business that has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space. AOL is not in a position at this time to further fund and support Bebo in pursuing a turnaround in social networking.” AOL is committed to working quickly to determine if there are any interested parties for Bebo and the company’s current expectation is to complete our strategic evaluation by the end of May 2010.” ...

I have seen a lot of these lately. This one currently doing the rounds tries to dupe the reader into thinking that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) wants to use their accounts to transfer money meant for charity. In the email. the IMF (supposedly) wants to transfer $10 Million into the reader’s account using NatWest Bank. The contact details within the Bank are given as follows: ...

I have received a message this morning from an ICQ account with the following text written in UTF-8 and plain text: The message from ICQ.com ****** Hello. _ICQ.com: we Remind you that all ICQ numbers which have not passed activation, 1.1.2010 will be removed from a server without restoration possibility. _ _The status of yours ICQ numbers: NOT activated. _ For activation send SMS on number 8353 with the text 144444 In the reciprocal message you receive acknowledgement on activation and your password from number. ICQ.com Together with AOL.com ...

(CNN) (CNET) — Facebook this week was awarded a patent pertaining to streaming “feed” technology — more specifically, “dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network,” complementing another patent filing that has been published but not yet approved. The implications for this, as AllFacebook.com pointed out earlier on Thursday, are far-flung: Facebook may choose to pursue action against other social-media sites that potentially violate this patent. ...

It has been barely two days since Google announced their new social integration and messaging tool called Google Buzz. Today we saw the first example of malware, W32/Zuggie-A, pretending to be Google Buzz. Analysis of W32/Zuggie-A gives the impression of a hastily assembled worm, really a modification of the W32/SillyFDC family of worms but with a twist. When W32/Zuggie-A is installed, it creates the following files: Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\extensions{9CE11043-9A15-4207-A565-0C94C42D590D}\chrome\content\timer.xul Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\extensions{9CE11043-9A15-4207-A565-0C94C42D590D}\chrome.manifest Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\extensions{9CE11043-9A15-4207-A565-0C94C42D590D}\install.rdf System\googlebuzz.exe – copy of W32/Zuggie-A System\GoogleUpte.exe – copy of W32/Zuggie-A W32/Zuggie-A modifies the registry to autostart GoogleUpte.exe and googlebuzz.exe. A quick search shows that the CLSID: 9CE11043-9A15-4207-A565-0C94C42D590D has previously been seen in multiple worms. This supports my theory that this is a hastily assembled worm built from recycled malware. I fired up a copy of Firefox on the infected machine and, as determined from analysis, found an installed Firefox extension called Firefox security 2.0 – Internal security options editor under the extensions tab of Firefox Add-ons. This “security extension” has added a JavaScript (timer.xul), which is triggered when the browser queries: yahoo.com, bing.com, google.com, aol.com/aol/search, ask.com and executes JavaScript hosted on: searchrequest1 . com / request . php ? aid = blackout which will silently click all Google or Yahoo Ads. displayed on the search results page (hey why not make a few bucks while infecting eh?). Google Buzz is new and is garnering quite a bit of interest and adoption among Internet users including myself. Clearly the malware authors view Google Buzz as the fresh big lucrative social fruit to exploit much like they have done with Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 and others. So in the coming weeks and months I predict we will see a host of new malware exploiting or attempting to exploit Google Buzz as the malware authors figure out its internals. This may have only been an exploratory attempt or a quick response to the latest craze – only time will tell. ...

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. ...