Report

The Indian Premier League 2010 is a huge attraction for the cricket-crazy population in India. These matches are packed with all the ingredients to entertain, and are capable of satisfying viewers’ hunger for more and more cricket matches. People are ready to buy tickets in all possible ways just to watch their local and international cricket stars play. Symantec was anticipating a spamming campaign against ticket sales during the initial period of the sporting extravaganza; however, it is just halfway through the event and still not too late to lure email users with offers related to IPL tickets. ...

Search terms that are censored in China: “Tibet” “Tiananmen Square protests” “Carrot” Apaprently “carrot” has a Chinese character that is the same as the surname of President Hu Jintao. The New York Times has run a great story by Shiho Fukada about Internet censorship in China, where the effort to control the content seen by 384 million Internet users who have 181 million blogs is like “herding cats.” “This is China’s censorship machine, part George Orwell, part Rube Goldberg: an information sieve of staggering breadth and fineness, yet full of holes; run by banks of advanced computers, but also by thousands of Communist Party drudges; highly sophisticated in some ways, remarkably crude in others,” Fukada wrote. ...

It was only a matter of time before the merest of “iPad” mentions on sites such as Twitter would result in autospammed messages like this: These bots will fire a message claiming “we need someone to test and keep one iPad” (or simply “Free iPad here”) to anyone discussing the latest gadget to hit the streets, sending you to various promotional sites like the one below: ...

Hong Kong-based security firm Network Box reported that Korea was the country of origin for 31.1 percent of the malware on the Internet in March. In February the country only pumped out 8.9 percent, leading researchers to theorize that there has been a huge increase in infected machines there pushing out phishing spam. Network Box includes phishing in its calculations of monthly malware statistics. They also include North and South Korea as one country in their categories, but say the lack of public computers in the North means that South Korea is the country of origin for the bulk of the statistic. ...

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): ...

“Shadows in the Cloud” hang over the otherwise sunny PRC A spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign ministry has tried to minimize a report from investigators in Toronto that hackers based in China breached computers of the Indian Government and others and downloaded classified material. The Information Warfare Monitor and the Shadowserver Foundation extensively documented an eight-month investigation that revealed a network of infected government and military computers. The net was controlled from servers in China and stole a variety of classified documents. They posted their 52-page report, “Shadows in the Cloud: investigating cyber espionage 2.0” today on scribd.com ...

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. ...

Rob VandenBrink has written a piece on the SANS web site Diary (“The Many Paths to Security Awareness”) with an interesting take on the very large topic of computer security awareness. “Security Awareness does not mean the same thing to everyone in a company,” sums up his point. “From a Security Awareness perspective the blanket term ‘end user’ grows to encompass many audiences – not only folks with basic desks and phones, but developers, senior managers, salespeople, engineers, health-care professionals, all kinds of people with different concerns, different goals, and a different set of reasons/excuses for exceptions to one thing or another,” he wrote. ...

Though it is true that malware is getting more and more sophisticated I am sometimes surprised by the lack of skills coming from wannabe botnet operators. Today, I stumbled upon a hacker’s forum which nicely demonstrates just how low is the technical knowledge level of the forum members. A search for “Zeus” produces several hundred results, many of them surprisingly basic, looking for help with installing a Zeus server or an advice about the best bulletproof hosting. ...

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). ...