Bing

GFI Labs Blog: We’ve noted this before, but Microsoft needs to get a handle on ad placements on Bing. Ok, so Bing isn’t the most widely used search engine, but remember that Yahoo plays a part here as well. In this case, we’re talking Sirefef (ZeroAccess aka Max++), probably the nastiest piece of malware circulating on the ‘net right now. Sirefef kills any attempt to remove it, and is nearly impossible to clean (short of booting onto a rescue disk and performing cleanup actions, or reformatting). ...

Mashable: Bing is getting an early start on the “best of 2010” lists, releasing its compilation of the year’s most popular search terms a little more than a month before the New Year. Reality TV star Kim Kardashian tops the list, which is dominated by celebrities; in fact, seven of the top 10 terms are people, as you can see in the list: Kim Kardashian Sandra Bullock Tiger Woods Lady Gaga Barack Obama Hairstyles Kate Gosselin Walmart Justin Bieber free Kardashian’s online dominance extends beyond searches, however. You may recall that a recent study pegged her as the celeb that gets the most traffic to their website via Twitter (despite not having the largest audience). ...

Microsoft and Facebook Wednesday unveiled some new search tools for Bing which integrate data from a user’s circle of friends into Bing’s search results. In the Bing blog on Wednesday, Microsoft Senior Vice President of online services Satya Nadella said 50% of users consider their friends’ opinions when making a decision online. Bing is trying to capitalize on this by incorporating the “likes” of a user’s friend list into search results. ...

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. ...

For anyone that missed Microsoft CEO’s Q&A during the Search Marketing Expo West yesterday, a transcript is now available online. I went through and picked out key quotes, so that you don’t have to read the whole thing. Several things stand out from Ballmer’s comments: Mobile operators that want a search engine other than Bing can’t have Windows Phone 7 Series. Microsoft almost certainly is stirring up trouble for Google in Europe through third parties. Microsoft isn’t interested — at least for now — in releasing a Bing application for Android phones. A Bing for iPhone search deal is still possible, simply because Ballmer deflected the question rather than denying it. Twitter is a great Microsoft partner, but the value of an acquisition is “not clear.” My favorite quote from the Q&A: “I haven’t found that when you’re trying to sell something to somebody yelling is very effective.” How funny is that. coming from boisterous Ballmer? ...

Criminals like to attack the biggest target because BIGGER generally provides a better Return On Investment (ROI). Windows is a good example. Mac is indeed safer than Windows but it isn’t necessarily because Mac is more secure. Windows has a larger market share and that equals more potential victims. How about search engines? What is the biggest search engine on the block? Google — and the bad guys know it. The result? ...

At the ShmooCon hacker conference in Washington, D.C., last week two security researchers showed the very sensitive information that people inadvertently make available over peer-to-peer networks. In their presentation, “Information disclosure via P2P networks: Why stealing an identity via Gnutella is like clubbing baby seals,” pen testers Larry Pesce and Mick Douglas said they found a lot of music, porn, malcode collections and the following: driver’s licenses, passport and tax return forms with Social Security numbers; someone’s will A retirement analysis form with savings account totals and income estimates; An IRS form with taxpayer identification number; A completed Turbo Tax form with personal information filled in. The two have started The Cactus Project to help security specialists do similar research to help organizations tighten up the information they share over P2P. They list best-of-breed tools for conducting the research, including Mutella and the Gnutella Protocol on their site http://pauldotcom.com/cactusproject.html. ...

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. ...

We were made aware that phishing for Skype credentials is currently taking place. The link the phishing mails direct to are dangerous – they aren’t detected by any phishing filter of the popular browsers yet. One thing caught my attention. Modern browsers should support domain highlighting so that the real domain is visible when someone surfs the Internet. Like Internet Explorer 8 properly does: There you can clearly see that you are not on the Skype website, but on another domain. ...

Earlier this evening, Microsoft formally announced a new search app for iPhone on the Bing Community blog. The Bing app is available now from the App Store, complete with voice search. I emphasize the now because the app has a December 16 release date on the 15th. Based on a very quick, cursory look, Bing is a competent iPhone app, tapping into the kind of capabilities expected from the platform. Bing fits nicely into the App Store repertoire. I wouldn’t call the features revolutionary — Apple and Google are there already with advanced mapping and GPS — but the packaging appeals, and Microsoft manages to offer a user experience that is fairly consistent with Bing Web search. ...