Fun

SophosLabs: Facebook has taken security to a whole new level. I think this speaks for itself.

How not to manage your passwords… John, and his unique approach to security is part of an F-Secure Internet Security 2011 campaign. You can find more at besmarterthanjohn.com.

During our analysis of the different malware families we sometimes stumble upon some messages inside the viruses placed there by their authors. For example, the TDSS Trojan family is known to contain random strings from “Hamlet” and from the Bible. Also there is the Koobface family which contains random sentences – mostly taken from Wikipedia articles, like in the last variant we discovered, about the Tower of London. TDSS: ...

Alert reader Joe Fernandez over at the MalwareUp forum (http://malwareup.org) sent us a tip on this one. He was checking out the scripting in a rogue security product and found a little note to the guys at ESET anti-virus company (which makes ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4 referred to below): ...

Avid readers of the Microsoft Support Lifecycle Blog (and really, how can you not be?) know that yesterday, April 13th, marked the end of support for Windows Vista RTM, also known as Windows Vista SP0. We’d like to say that we’ll miss Vista RTM. We’d like to say that… but, well… Ctrl+Alt+Del On a related note, Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) will reach its end of support this summer on July 13th. There are more positive memories of XP SP2, largely because of its emphasis on security. ...

Every once in a while, you find some odd piece of text in a piece of malware. Debugging the TDL 3 rootkit yields some interesting results. Here are messages that dump in the debug window at various times: Fri Apr 9 09:02:37.495 2010 (GMT-4): You people voted for Hubert Humphrey, and you killed Jesus Fri Apr 9 09:03:01.900 2010 (GMT-4): Ah Lou, come on man, we really like this place Fri Apr 9 11:53:08.715 2010 (GMT-4): Dude, meet me in Montana XX00, Jesus (H. Christ) Fri Apr 9 12:18:27.522 2010 (GMT-4): I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every panda that wouldn’t screw to save it’s species. I wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers and smother all those french beaches I’d never see. I wanted to breathe smoke ...

Very funny: The story starts with an guy insulting everyone on the IRC channel. Most people there believed it was rather funny, but it got even more funny. For information: The dangerous hacker is called bitchchecker and the one being hacked and original author of the comments, who is talking here, is known as Elch. 127.0.0.1 is always the IP-adress of the computer you’re currently using, any request there will return to your computer. ...