Posts Tagged ‘malware’

1978 – The first computer bulletin board system is created in Chicago, Illinois by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess. The Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS) came together in 30 days, where it was then launched. Even though it was turned on for testing, today was the dayh the CBBS went into production.

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Other Historical Events in Technology

• Inauguration of 911
• First known Malware for Mac OS X
• Lance Armstrongs’ bike is stolen.

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The Guardian takes a long look at trends in malware.

Among the trends they note are these:

• Threats coming less and less from vandals and mischief-makers and more and more from organized crime, with increasing emphasis on money-making fraud and decreasing emphasis on breaking into systems just to show it can be done.
• Less dependency on stealth technology and more dependency on “social engineering” to deliver malware. In other words, as firewalls and other anti-malware programs have gotten better, the bad guys are developing more sophisticated ways to get users to throw open the front door and invite them in. (Scareware is an excellent example of this trend.)

The authors of the article also find a disconnect between the eagerness of some governments (the Guardian is a British paper) to clamp down on illegal file-sharing, as with “three strikes you’re out” laws, while doing little to fight purveyors of malware or spam. and asks:

The British government wants to stop filesharing to protect copyright owners, but shows no similar enthusiasm for protecting the general public from malware, which is arguably more important to us – and perhaps to the nation. After all, what happens to e-commerce if people don’t feel secure enough to buy things, do their banking or interact with government online?

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I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago just through happenstance. Todd Cochrane mentioned it in Friday’s podcast.

The Guardian reports a new twist. Roger Thompson of AVG thinks that the bad guys have figured out how to automate creation of phony Facebook accounts.

According to Roger Thompson, chief research officer with antivirus company AVG Labs, a rising number of bogus profiles were being used to try and tempt the social network’s users into downloading viruses.

In a post on the AVG Labs blog, he explained how the fake accounts had appeared, with a request to download a video. If unsuspecting users clicked on the link, it downloaded a piece of malicious software to their computer.

“Clearly, the data snatchers have found a way to automate the creation of Facebook accounts,” Thompson wrote. “I’m sure Facebook will deactivate all these accounts as quickly as they find them, but it can’t be an easy thing for them to find.”

In the case I know about personally (link above), the accounts were not fake; they were real accounts that had been somehow hijacked. The messages my friend received were fake, but she knew the senders in person and knew the accounts did indeed exist.

I find a simple moral. Treat stuff that arrives in pixels with the same caution that you treat stuff that arrives in print. That’s what my friend did: the message looked fishy, so she didn’t open it.

It has confounded me since the early days of the inner tubes that persons will believe stuff they read on the computer screen when they wouldn’t believe the same stuff if they read it the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Full Disclosure: I use and recommend AVG products because they do what they promise at a reasonable price. That’s the only connection I have with the outfit.

(Update at the end.)

There’s some malware circulating around Facebook in bogus messages with subject lines like “Wow! Are you really in this video?”

I received an email from a friend of mine this morning that contained a forwarded Facebook message:

Could you check this out? AVG says it’s a dangerous Trojan Horse virus. Not sure what that is, but don’t want it.

(snip signature)

[Redacted] sent you a message.

Subject: Wow! Are you really in this video?

“:)
http://www.facebook.com/l/[redacted]:[redacted]“

The colon in the web address is significant; more on that later.

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Possibly, argues some persons interviewed by the New York Times. Attacks against operating systems are decreasing in favor of attacks against vulnerable programs and against websites.

This is no surprise. Computer security–indeed, most security–follows a “catch-up” model: assess what’s going on and defend against it. As defenses improve, attackers naturally move on to different targets.

I used to work for a company that manufactured physical security products, primarily anti-theft and access control software and hardware (I was in the access control support and training function). It was accepted within the company that security could not keep persons from stealing; it could only keep them from stealing from you.

When you buy a better lock, the bad guys will just go down the street till they find a house with a weaker lock.

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I was looking for a defunct website at the Internet Archive and stumbled across a place that had squatted on the name of the site.

That page redirected to one of those fraudulent sites that pretends to scan your computer for malware so it can trick you into buying their anti-malware product. Most of the time, their product is actually more malware.

I clicked “Cancel” scan and it pretended to scan anyway while popups cascaded. One give away was that the phony scan’s progess bar moved faster than a scan from a local disk could have done, let alone a scan over the net (and I have used internet AV scans from reputable vendors such as Trend Micro and Symantec). It then told me that I had oodles of trojans, viruses, and other assorted baddies on my C: and D: drives.

This box runs Ubuntu Linux with Fluxbox. I don’t have C: and D: drives; I have sda1* (a very small boot drive) and sda3* (everything else). I don’t have a “My Documents” folder.

Here’s what it claimed to see:

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The New York Times reports that it’s still out there and still mutating. So far, it’s continued to spread, but otherwise has given no sign of doing anything else.

The Times claims that the AV researchers are impressed by the quality of the engineering that continues to go into Conficker, but that they still have no idea what it’s supposed to do. They think it must have some purpose to warrant the amount of energy that has been used to improve and propogate it.

Excerpt below the fold.

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The Guardian reports that there’s a new kid in town, and he’s breaking windows via the Google. The story is here.

A computer virus that targets Google users is mutating rapidly, turning it into what some are calling the biggest threat to online security today.

The worm, known as Gumblar, attacks computers through vulnerabilities in some version of Adobe’s PDF reader and Flash player software. Once it infects a victim’s PC, it silently redirects the user’s Google search results to sites that download more malware onto the machine or allow criminals to conduct “phishing” attacks to steal login details for banking, social networking and websites.

The worm spreads from infected website. The story recommends the Unmask Parasites tool for scanning a site; I just scanned my own site and it came up clean.

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Torrents can be really helpful, however, they can also be used for passing of copyrighted material. MP3’s movies, programs, all plague torrent sites. Some with keygens to break the program keys. Others with malware installed to steal data from your computer.

Some say to fight this, Torrents need to be shut down. Others say that controlled torrents are needed for open source documents. It’s a big battle back and forth.

One way to combat is to go after the Torrents themselves. Pirate Bay, for example. However, if a Torrent lives in another country, the legal battle gets harder.

TorrentSpy was a bittorrent indexing service. They showed people where the .torrent files lived. the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed a $110 million dollar lawsuit for infringement of files. US District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper agreed with the MPAA and Torrentspy was ordered to pay up, along with a perminant injunction on the site.

There is a lot of good that can come from a torrent site. If we could curb the illegal action and make safe areas so you can download copyright free or Creative Commons no-deriv music, movies and documents, the torrent would be better embraced.

There is a lot more on the Week in Tech History – Check out the Podcast!

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Bruce Schneier, writing in the Guardian, attempts to use the Conficker scare to illustrate larger lessons in human psychology. In particular, he wonders why Conficker led to global cyber-panic, at least among Windows users, whereas other, equally or more dangerous malware passes almost unnoticed almost every day.

Frankly, I think his reasoning is a bit over the top, but it’s still an interesting read. The full column is here.

An excerpt below the fold:

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