Security

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 ...

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. ...

I could talk about how The Matrix was a pretty big deal for me back in the day, or how The Matrix Online is (to date) the only MMORPG I ever liked enough to pay a monthly subscription for, or how I think people doing Kung Fu in bullet time is still the best thing ever. Mostly, I’ll just show you this: And this: Is there a glitch in the Matrix? You bet. Unfortunately it seems the website of one of the actors from Reloaded / Revolutions (Harry Lennix, who played Commander Lock) has been hacked and is now, bizarrely, the scene of some Cyber Kung-Fu gone wrong as two warring factions go to, er, war. ...

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: ...

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. ...

Spammers have decided that in order for Apple to meet sky-high growth expectations from its shareholders, Apple needs to diversify into selling drugs online. The spam looks similar to the following message below: Spammers have setup various hacked sites to redirect traffic to online drug stores. However, the spammers are probably frowning/pouting now as Sophos has once again thwarted their plans.

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. ...

Our good friends at Hanoi, Viet Nam, -based security firm Bkis have written about an interesting malcode lure: Trojans masquerading as updates for popular applications such as Adobe, Java or Windows. The fake updates are distributed with icons of the application they’re impersonating. Analyst Nguyen Cong Cuong wrote: “In addition, on being executed, they immediately turn on the following services: DHCP client, DNS client, Network share and open port to receive hacker’s commands.” ...

The Inquirer security news site were reporting that the 25-year-old arrested by French police for hacking a Twitter data base and accessing U.S. President Barak Obama’s account guessed the admin’s password. The unemployed man, who went by the handle “Hacker Croll.” is not a genius, the news site concluded. “Apparently it was a doddle to do. He simply guessed people’s passwords by working them out from information on their blogs or online pages they had created about themselves,” it said. ...