Security

I’m almost certain this shouldn’t be on the Nokia.de webspace, lurking under the “online.nokia.de” subdomain: Don’t worry though, Admin – they “just changed your index”. This isn’t the first time Nokia domains have come under attack. The above defacement – by an Albanian hacker called “Spammer” – seems eager to let the webmaster know they can help with the bugs, but I’m pretty sure an email would have been just as useful. Nokia.de have been notified of the defacement, but I’ve had no word back as of yet.

Don’t run your PC with admin privileges Sometimes in life you know something is a risk, but you don’t know how BIG a risk it is until somebody actually checks it out. There was a German scientist in Russia who repeated Ben Franklin’s kite-in-the-thunder-storm experiment but didn’t live to write up his results. Los Angeles security firm BeyondTrust has released an analysis of Microsoft’s 75 security bulletins last year. They came to the startling conclusion that if users had operated their computers without administrative rights they would have eliminated 64 percent of their risk from Microsoft vulnerabilities! ...

Whole Foods, a popular health and organic grocery chain, is the subject of a new Facebook scam that phishes for users’ credit and other personal information. A deluge of fraudulent Facebook Pages are popping up that promise a limited number of users Whole Foods gift cards. These Pages are accruing thousands of fans and siphoning off sensitive and lucrative data. The groups offering Whole Foods gift cards are in no way affiliated with the supermarket; rather, con artists are using the Pages to uncover important personal and financial information from users via a bogus credit assessment. After giving the requested information, users watch their computers crash as their identities are completely exposed. ...

Good God! A 419 scam email from someone in grade school! From: FBI AGENT [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2010 7:34 AM Subject: FBI AGENT Hello honest people……… We got your contact from our Microsoft data-base system. This is to inform you all that have lost money to Scammers in Africa, Europe and USA. We hear by inform you there is quick opportunity for you mostly on lottery. My name is FBI brad Martins I assure you am doing all I can to get your lost money back in 2 days . I know what scam means. I work with the global scam Fither in CA 93535.we have all the global scam computer to trace all Scammers Name and location. Reply back to us. We just caught a scammer now, and we found some money with him, we are returning it back to those involves. This mean your money will be refund back to you.Get back to the FBI through this email for immediate response [email protected]

Spyware/DDoS malware combo Google’s security team member Neel Mehta has blogged about yet one more spyware attack on Google users from Asia. This time forces in Vietnam apparently are trying to spy on and stifle dissent from those opposed to the expansion of bauxite mining in the country’s central highlands. The dissenters are opposed to the environmental impact, the involvement of Chinese in the venture and the displacement of people who live in the mining area. Bauxite is the ore that aluminum is extracted from. ...

It seems I prompted an exploration of infection related search terms in Google Trends over on the Forbes.com Firewall blog. “Malware” is becoming a sort of catch-all term for end-users, slowly replacing the various types of Ad/Mal/Spyware classifications. Article here – worth checking out the comment by Andy Hayter, Anti-Malcode Program Manager of ICSA Labs, too. Of course, I like to think I might have contributed in some small way to certain search terms going the way of the Dinosaur…

Didier Stevens, security professional and blogger, has found a “feature” in the PDF file format that makes it possible to package an executable in a PDF file which will run in Foxit PDF reader or run in Adobe Reader with a bit of social engineering. “With Adobe Reader, the only thing preventing execution is a warning. Disabling JavaScript will not prevent this (I don’t use JavaScript in my PoC PDF), and patching Adobe Reader isn’t possible (I’m not exploiting a vulnerability, just being creative with the PDF language specs).” ...

Today, our friends at Trend Micro blogged about a new attack vector using Microsoft Word documents. We saw this as well last week, and have written a detection for the dropped trojan. It’s not just a “lawsuit” that’s being spammed, we also picked up another form of this attack in our honeypots over the weekend: When you open the Word document, you see a “PDF”, but it’s actually not. It’s a JPG, which links to an executable. ...

We’ve been seeing Fake AV programs getting more convincing for a while now. Some of the tricks employed by the guys behind these rogue programs include Windows-7-style fake scanners, in-browser “scanners”, and program features that ape other aspects of the operating system. Yesterday, though, we came across a misleading application called AntiVirusDemoFraud that is—how to say?—possibly a little less sophisticated than some in terms of user interface design. ...

Does a Facebook-specific antivirus application sound like a good idea? Maybe not. One of our analysts saw this particular application claiming to be an antivirus wreak havoc on his Friends list. Of course, there is no such thing. Once installed on one Friend’s account, this application tags 20 Friend into a picture such as the one below: If a Friend looking through the photos then clicks on the app’s (apparently randomly generated) link, they’ll see this: ...