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FakeAV Gang Targets Farmville – #1 Facebook Game

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 7, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 183 words

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): ...

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POC is out: a worm that spreads via PDFs

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 7, 2010
  • Reading Time: 2 min
  • Word Count: 408 words

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. ...

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Chrome Growing in Popularity Faster Than Rival Browsers

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 7, 2010
  • Reading Time: 2 min
  • Word Count: 255 words

Chrome’s share of the browser market is growing at a breakneck pace, according to data from Net Applications. Between February and March, Google’s browser rose to capture a full 6.1% share of the market, maintaining its lead over browsers such as Safari and Opera and closing the gap between Firefox, which currently holds a 24.5% share. While most browsers rose a fraction of a percent, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer continued to decline, losing almost a whole percent over the past month alone. ...

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Java Applet Attack Targets XBox Gamers

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 7, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 205 words

If you like downloading or installing programs on your PC related to XBox gaming, you might want to take heed of this writeup. There’s a fake application kit in circulation that allows an attacker to create a website claiming to be an XBox Live application that takes the form of a Java install. Upon visiting a site related to this scam, the end-user will see a blank webpage with nothing other than a Java notice and a fake Softpedia award at the bottom of the screen: ...

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Are you reading this with Internet Explorer version 6?

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 3, 2010
  • Reading Time: 3 min
  • Word Count: 550 words

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. ...

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Rogue Toolbars Serve Up Facebook Phishing Pages

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 3, 2010
  • Reading Time: 3 min
  • Word Count: 436 words

There are a number of Toolbars out there in the wild with a nasty sting in the tail for anybody using them to login to Facebook. We’ve seen two of these so far; it’s possible there are more. Promoted as toolbars that allow you to cheat at popular Zynga games such as Mafia Wars, they appear to be normal at first glance with a collection of links to various websites and other features common to this type of program. ...

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Will fuzzing save civilization as we know it?

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 3, 2010
  • Reading Time: 2 min
  • Word Count: 290 words

Tom Gallagher, senior security test lead with Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, was extensively quoted in news stories today as he described how his group found 1,800 software flaws in Office 2010 by running millions of “fuzzing” tests. According to ComputerWorld, “Microsoft was able to find such a large number of bugs in Office 2010 by using not only machines in the company’s labs, but also under-utilitized or idle PCs throughout the company. The concept isn’t new: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI@home) project may have been the first to popularize the practice, and remains the largest, but it’s also been used to crunch numbers in medical research and to find the world’s largest prime number. ...

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Firefox claims 30 percent market share

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: April 2, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 157 words

Mozilla.org has made public a report that says its Firefox browser has 30 percent market share worldwide. Assuming it’s true, that is a six percent increase since a news story last November. The Mozilla Metrics report 1Q2010 says the browser has 39.2 percent penetration in Europe (152.7 million users) and 29 percent in the U.S. (100 million users.) Mozilla claims 350 million users worldwide. Adoption is quickest in Russia (20 percent increase in the first quarter) the report said. ...

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Chrome 5 becomes the Flash browser, integrates plug-in with dev build

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: March 30, 2010
  • Reading Time: 7 min
  • Word Count: 1392 words

With Google owning YouTube, the Internet’s principal delivery system for Flash-based video, it was perhaps inevitable that the company would bundle the Flash plug-in with its Chrome browser. The announcement came today from both Google and the team developing the open source Chromium component on which Chrome is based. The move now officially places Google in contention with proponents of HTML 5, who had held out a glimmer of hope for a non-proprietary, non-plug-in video format for the standard’s new [VIDEO] element. In its blog post today, the Chromium team indirectly blamed the standards process for not having solved what it perceives as the problem of specifying how plug-ins should operate, and credits Mozilla — which makes Firefox — with helping to rectify that issue. ...

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Test of China Internet connections reveals heavy filtering

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: March 30, 2010
  • Reading Time: 2 min
  • Word Count: 335 words

Using a Firefox 3.0 add-on created by developers in Hong Kong, Betanews was able to briefly establish a connection with the Internet via a proxy based in mainland China. With that proxy, we were able to confirm that searches performed using Google’s Hong Kong-based page were effectively blocked. Firefox 3.0 reported the blockage with this message: “The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading” — a message from the browser, not from an ISP. We used version 3.0.16 of Firefox (an older edition) because it is the only version compatible with China Channel, a tool made for the express purpose of testing China’s filtering ability. It has not been upgraded for version 3.6. ...

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