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“Dancing with the Stars Lineup 2010″ Malware

Bryce Whitty — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:16:01 +0000

A Technibble subscriber and a fellow computer technician, Patrick Croteau of www.logic1.com sent us an interesting tip today. One of his clients was infected with a typical rogue-antivirus which he went out and cleaned up. However, they managed to reinfect themselves later that day and upon checking their internet history he found this:

When you search for “dancing with the stars 2010 lineup” on Google, which is a fairly innocent query and probably searched for a lot; the top result is a hacked site with malware hosted on it.

When you visit it, you’ll see your typical “You have 100 viruses” scareware.

Once installed, the malware product appears to be the rogue antivirus “CleanUp Antivirus”.

As Patrick said “I’ll bet its making them a fortune”. Such an innocent query with a malicious site as the top result. If you ever do encounter this infection, BleepingComputer.com have removal instructions for Cleanup Antivirus.

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“Dancing with the Stars Lineup 2010″ Malware

Acer Recalls Notebook Computers Due to Burn Hazard

Bryce Whitty — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:22:35 +0000

Acer has recalled about 22,000 Acer Aspire-series Notebook computers do to a potential burn hazard. There is an internal microphone wire under the palm rest can short circuit and overheat.

The recalled Notebook computer models that we should look out for are:

AS3410
AS3410T
AS3810T
AS3810TG
AS3810TZ
AS3810TZG

The computer’s screen size is about 13.3 inches measured diagonally. Not all units are affected. Consumers should contact Acer to determine if their unit is included in the recall. These computers were sold at:

ABS Computer Technologies, D&H Distributing, Fry’s Electronics, Ingram Micro, Radio Shack, SED/American Express, Synnex Corporation, SYX Distribution, Tech Data Corporation and other retailers nationwide and Amazon.com from June 2009 through October 2009 for between $650 and $1,150.

Here is the offical US Consumer Product Safety Commission report:
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml10/10103.html

Antivirus Products Being Released on USB Drives

Bryce Whitty — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 07:51:39 +0000

Today, while I was at a local shopping center with my fiancée I quickly ducked into a computer store to have a look around. While I was there I found this:

It appears that antivirus companies have begun to sell their products on USB thumb drives. This is a great idea now that Netbooks are more common since many of them don’t have an optical drive. In fact, some antivirus companies such as Panda Security are making a Netbook specific versions of their antivirus products which are lighter on resources and come on a USB drive.

Another great thing about antivirus products coming on a USB drive is that the installation of the antivirus product (which usually takes ages) would happen much faster, since it is usually much faster than installing something from a CD.

Lastly, at the end of the day the customer is left with a USB drive which they could use for other purposes.

Google Apps Grow Up, Exclaims “Look at me, no more Beta!”

Ryan Meray — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:53:29 +0000

Someone should check the thermostat in Hades, because I never thought I’d see this day. Google announced this morning that Google Apps, the corporate and public versions of its popular mail, calendar, chat and document software, no longer wear the beta tag.

Since its launch on April 1st, 2004, Gmail has worn the ‘beta’ tag, even after adoption by millions of home and business users and over 5 years of development.

Speculation has been rampant as to when it would finally leave beta status. A five-year development cycle isn’t the norm for almost any software, unless you’re developing ground-breaking, world-changing games, and many mocked Google for using ‘beta’ as a crutch for so long.

It’s about time. Welcome to Release Candidate land, Google. Now, can we talk about integrating custom signatures and mail templates? Love, Ryan.

Twitter Trending Topics Used to Tweet Malware

Ryan Meray — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:49:10 +0000

First it was spammy viral marketers and childish pranks. Now Twitter has reached the same level of insecurity as everywhere else on the web, as scammers have begun to tweet out malware-ridden links. While this isn’t YATW, these malware makers are hijacking trending topics to push their poison into the wild.

Mashable reports on how scammers have begun to spread links to sites “Twitterbest” and “Zasaden” on the .mp domain. Both host the commonly seen flash codec trojan which prompts the user to allow installation of what is supposedly an update to Adobe Flash player, and in actuality a rogue anti-virus utility, this one going by the name of “Fast Anti-Virus 2009.” The name may sound familiar to technicians on the front lines of virus removal, as it has been used by rogue anti-virus programs dating back to at least May.

Avoiding the bad domains is only half of the battle though, due to the fact that the vast majority of URLs posted on Twitter are via URL shortening services. Without 3rd party tools, there’s no way to tell where these links terminate before clicking them, and the trust instilled in most people by social media provides a sufficiently wide opening through which to ram a trojan exploit.

The upside is that since Twitter is apparently already censoring trending topics, we might be one step closer to finally getting rid of them altogether.

Best Video! – Yet Another Twitter Worm

Ryan Meray — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:26:41 +0000

Sometime yesterday, the worm began compromising the accounts of people who clicked on a link to a video on the juste.ru domain. These zombified accounts were then used to post another link to the video. “Best Video: http://juste.ru/?…” tweets began to spread across the twittersphere.

It appears that unlike previous twitter worms, this one doesn’t work off of cross-site scripting (XSS) but instead installs some sort of malware to compromise your account details. Further, it appears to be able to grab Facebook login information as well, and it has begun to propagate on that network as well.

Suffice to say, the only way to stay safe is to be careful about clicking on shortened URLs (there are handy tools to preview the URL before surfing to it) and to fervently avoid landing on the Juste.ru domain. Of course, this is only a stopgap measure, since new malicious domains and malware will be out as soon as one site shuts down.

Avoiding the twitter web interface in favor of a standalone client is a nice safeguard against XSS attacks and may even be been helpful in this situation. Perusing a random sampling of some of the compromised accounts, the vast majority seemed to do most of their tweeting from the web interface, underscoring twitter’s continued vulnerability in the face of these constant exploits.

Since this is happening with such frequency, we might as well coin YATW and use that going forward.

Twitter has already begun temporarily suspending the compromised accounts, deleting the offending posts, and returning them back to their proper owners.

(via Techcrunch and Mashable

Gwitter? Twoogle? Google Looks to Snatch up Twitter

Ryan Meray — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:31:57 +0000

Despite having no business model to speak of, the hottest little micro-blogging site on the web, Twitter, is being eyed tentatively by search behemoth Google.

If this is an April Fool’s Joke, it’s a little late to the party.

While initial word made it sound like the negotiations were in the late stages, the current speculation is that talks have merely just begun. Nonetheless, users are atwitter about the news, with opinion divided about whether or not the acquisition would be a desirable or not. On one hand, Google’s incredible server resources could bring an end to the dreaded Fail Whale. The biggest concern is that Google will instantly monetize the service, vis-a-vis some sort of adwords implementation, subscription mechanism, or other method(s).

It looks too early to say at this point what will happen, but after Facebook’s failed attempt late last year, some said it was inevitable that Twitter would be able to hold out against the siren call of money hats.

Google Apps Adds Support for Themes

Ryan Meray — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 07:04:57 +0000

Yesterday it was announced on the Google Enterprise Blog that Google would begin rolling out Themes support within Google Apps accounts.

Users have been awaiting the Themes feature since they were added to Gmail in November. Shortly thereafter, posts to the Google Apps help section went up seeking an ETA on the addition of the feature to Apps. A ‘Top Contributor’ on the site said then that Themes in Apps “should be appearing sometime later this week.”

Put that on record, folks. November 20th to March 30th is officially the longest week ever!

But it’s nice to finally see the feature. Now we can bask in the glow of Shiny or Summer Ocean all day long!

The Mighty Google Fails

Bryce Whitty — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:20:13 +0000

It seems Google is having serious problems today as every single link in their directory is marked a malware. Even if you chose the “Let me view this site anyway” option, Google would get a 502 error.
It seemed to have effected all search terms in all languages.

The issue has since been fixed but this is what it looked like:

Windows Jingle Attack

Lee — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 02:37:46 +0000

Information Week posted an article about an attack called Windows Jingle. It is a method about stealing a user’s password by encoding it on the Windows startup tone and then decoding it by using a local or remote microphone.

This attack requires malware on the user’s computer according to the article. Also, since it uses sound as a transmission for the data, the attacker does not need a network connection to get a user’s data.

This attack would also work for Mac OS X and Linux operating systems according to Eric Filiol who explained how this process works at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

Source: Information Week