CyberImpersonate

Cybercriminals have laced about 2,000 legitimate websites with a potent malware cocktail that surreptitiously attacks people who browse to them, a security researcher warned Friday.

Unlike past outbreaks of the mass web attack known as Gumblar, this round actually plants exploit code on the website servers themselves. Curiously, the directory and file name of the malicious payload is in most cases unique and identical to a legitimate file that existed on the website.

The trick makes it extremely difficult for webmasters and anti-malware programs to detect the threats.

“This is an ugly can of worms,” said Mary Landesman, the ScanSafe security researcher who warned of the mass attack. “Any time you see a new technique evolve like this the concern is we’ll be seeing much more of this in the future, and certainly it complicates the remediation of the compromised website.”

Previously, Gumblar planted links in thousands of compromised websites that silently redirected users to a handful of servers that hosted the exploits. That method allowed white hats to foil the attack by shutting down one or two domains. With the malware embedded directly in the compromised websites, the take-down process is significantly more time consuming.

Also making matters hard for Landesman to get the sites cleaned up: Most of the websites belong to small businesses that cater to non-English speakers. Few of them have dedicated security employees, and even when representatives can be located, the person contacting them must speak multiple languages.

While the websites are relatively small, Gumblar architects have planted links in online discussion forums across the web that often cause RSS readers to automatically send users to the booby-trapped pages. Landesman suspects black-hat search engine optimization may also be causing the infected sites to be featured prominently in results returned by Google and others.

People who are unfortunate enough to visit the sites won’t see anything unusual. But behind the scenes, a PHP script checks their version of Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash, and if their out of date, hijacks their PCs using known vulnerabilities. If both of those programs are up to date, the script tests to see if the system is vulnerable to several bugs Microsoft has patched in the last few months.

Hijacked machines will be installed with a backdoor that gives the hijackers complete control. They are also equipped with malware that manipulates search results returned by Google.

It’s unclear exactly how the sites are getting compromised. Landesman suspects FTP passwords for the sites have been lifted from administrators’ computers using key-logging malware.

Arhur Monderos is working in a company as antivirus software specialist and he runs his cool blog where he helps you to choose best antivirus software for you computer.

The CEO of Russia’s No. 1 anti-virus package has said that the internet’s biggest security vulnerability is anonymity, calling for mandatory internet passports that would work much like driver licenses do in the offline world.

The comments by Eugene Kaspersky, who is also the founder of Kaspersky Lab, came during an interview this week with Vivian Yeo of ZDNet Asia. In it, he proposed the formation of an internet police body that would require users everywhere to be uniquely identified.

“Everyone should and must have an identification, or internet passport,” he was quoted as saying. “The internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the US military. Then it was introduced to the public and it was wrongto introduce it in the same way.”

Kaspersky, whose comments are raising the eyebrows of some civil liberties advocates, went on to say such a system shouldn’t be voluntary.

“I’d like to change the design of the internet by introducing regulation – internet passports, internet police and international agreement – about following internet standards,” he continued. “And if some countries don’t agree with or don’t pay attention to the agreement, just cut them off.”

He rejected the notion that internet protocol numbers were sufficient for tracking a user, arguing they are too easy to come by.

“You’re not sure who exactly has the connection,” he explained. “Even if the IP address is traced to an internet cafe, they will not know who the customer or person is behind the attacks. Think about cars – you have plates on cars, but you also have driver licenses.”

Kaspersky was traveling on Friday and not available to be interviewed for this article. A company spokeswoman declined to comment.

Kaspersky admitted such a system would be hard to put in place because of the cost and difficulty of reaching international agreements. But remarkably, his interview transcript spends no time contemplating the inevitable downsides that would come in a world where internet anonymity is a thing of the past.

“You could make the same argument about the offline world,” said Matt Zimmerman, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “You know, every purchase you make should be tracked, we should ban the use of cash, we should put cameras up everywhere because in that massive data collection something might be collected to help someone. But we think privacy is an important enough countervailing value that we should prevent that.”

In Kaspersky’s world, services such as Psiphon and The Onion Router (Tor) – which are legitimately used by Chinese dissidents and Google users alike to shield personally identifiable information – would no longer be legal. Or at least they’d have to be redesigned from the ground up to give police the ability to surveil them. That’s not the kind of world many law-abiding citizens would feel comfortable inhabiting.

And aside from the disturbing big-brother scenario, there are the problematic logistics of requiring every internet user anywhere in the world to connect using an internationally approved device that authenticates his unique identity. There’s no telling how many innovations might be squashed under a system like that.

No doubt, the cybercriminals that Kaspersky has valiantly fought for more than a decade are only getting better at finding ways to exploit weaknesses in internet technologies increasingly at the heart of the way we shop, socialize and work. But to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, those who sacrifice net liberty for incremental increases in security no doubt will get neither.

Arhur Monderos is working in a company as antivirus software specialist and he runs his interesting blog where he helps you to choose best antivirus software for you computer.

categories: antivirus,software,virus,computers,security,malware,technology,blogs,internet,business,help,education,free

An airline passenger rights advocate is accusing Delta Air Lines of hacking into her computer and e-mail accounts to sabotage her organization’s attempts to mandate basic services during flight delays.

Kate Hanni, a resident of California, is the founder of the Coalition for an Airline Passengers Bill of Rights, an organization lobbying for federal laws that require airlines to provide bathroom access, clean air, and access to medical treatment when passengers are held up for hours on the tarmac. The legislation would also give passengers an option to exit the plane if they have been delayed on the tarmac for over three hours. Four versions of a “Airline Passenger’s Bill of Rights of 2009″ are currently pending before Congress.

In a lawsuit filed in Houston, Texas on Tuesday, Hanni accuses the world’s largest airline carrier and an aviation consulting firm of conspiring to breach her computer and email in order to derail her lobbying efforts. She seeks a minimum of $11m in damages.

According to court documents, Hanni claims earlier this year she began exchanging emails with Frederick Foreman, an analyst with Virginia-based Metron Aviation who was researching US government airline surface delay data. During their correspondence, both swapped data and information about surface delays without explicit permission from Metron, of which Delta is a client.

Hanni said her PC and American Online email account were both accessed illegally this summer, with AOL confirming the email breach. Some of her data was copied to an unknown location, and other files were corrupted and rendered useless.

The plot thickens in Foreman’s affidavit. He claims that on September 25, 2009, Metron executives confronted him with “what appeared to be hacked and stolen email communications” between Hanni and himself, as well as two media contacts. The emails were sent from his private accounts on MSN and AOL and not sent through Metron’s internal email system, he claims.

Foreman states in his sworn affidavit that the executive informed him the emails were sent to the Metron from Delta and that the airline was “mad and upset” Hanni had been provided with the flight delay information. Foreman claims he tried to explain that the data was publicly available online from US government statistics, but was still fired and escorted off the premises.

When reached for comment, Delta flatly stated, “the allegation that we would hack an individual’s e-mail is absurd.”

Hanni claims Delta has a motive for seeking and destroying her data because if passenger rights bills are passed, airlines stand to lose over $40m in revenues in addition to millions more in accommodations for customers exiting planes during long delays. Currently, airlines are not restricted by law on how long planes can hold passengers on the tarmac.

Arhur Monderos is working in a company as antivirus software specialist and he runs his cool blog where he helps you to choose best antivirus software for you computer.

Mozilla has introduced a service that checks Firefox browser plugins to make sure they don’t have known security vulnerabilities or incompatibilities.

The service debuted on Tuesday with this page, which checks 15 plugins to make sure they’re the most recent versions. Over time, Mozilla developers plan to scan additional addons, and they also plan to embed a feature into version 3.6 of the open-source browser that will automatically indicate which plugins used on a current page are out of date.

The offering builds on a feature Mozilla rolled out last month that warned Firefox users when they had an out-of-date version of Adobe’s Flash media player installed. In its first week, Mozilla statistics showed more than half of those who installed the latest Firefox release were running an insecure version of the frequently attacked plugin.

Not that the service has necessarily gotten off to as good a start as one might hope. Our tests failed to detect the use of Adobe Reader, another application widely abused by criminals. And other plugins, such as Google Picasa and the iTunes Application Detector were also left out in the cold.

But as Mozilla makes clear here, the page is only the beginning. Eventually, the organization plans to “create a self-service panel for vendors to update their plugin info as new releases come out.”

It’s initiatives such as these that demonstrate Mozilla’s dedication to the security of its users, and for that it deserves props. When legions of end users keep internet-facing software updated, we all win.

“We strongly recommend that add-on developers require SSL for updates to prevent the attack described above,” Window Snyder, chief security officer for Mozilla, stated in a post to the group’s developer blog.

The Mozilla Foundation released on Wednesday a patch for both version 1.5 and version 2.0 of the browser, fixing a critical memory corruption flaw.

Arhur Monderos is working in a company as antivirus software specialist and he runs his cool blog where he helps you to choose best antivirus software for you computer.

categories: antivirus,software,virus,computers,security,malware,technology,blogs,internet,business,help,education,free

If you have been using your laptop to play games or listen to music, you might be aware that the sound from a laptop typically sounds ‘tiny’. That is, it is nowhere near the audio quality of your Hi-Fi or TV. This article explores some ways in which you can boost your laptop audio for a better aural experience. You can play with the microphone jack, the headphone jack, as well as the line-in and line-out jacks.

1. Overview Most laptops come with a few connectivity options for audio. These include a microphone jack, headphone jack, as well as a line-in jack and line-out jack. We’ll take a look at each of these to understand how they can help improve your laptop audio experience.

2. Microphone Jack Your laptop should come with a microphone jack to record sounds. This is usually a female connector on the laptop. This accepts a 1/8 inch mono-aural (i.e. single channel). Usually, you will want to connect a microphone that has an electric condenser design – these are the best types of microphones to connect.

3. Headphone Jack A headphone jack is very important for listening to music on your laptop. Most laptops are designed to accept a 1/8 inch or 3.5 mm headphone plug. This outputs an audio signal from your laptop so you can enjoy movies and music from your laptop. Suitable headphones usually come with an impedance of 24 to 32 ohms. They can be directed to a set of external speakers (suitably amplified) to produce the best sound quality.

4. Line-in Jack Some laptops come with a line-in jack to allow you edit soundtracks or music. What happens is that the output of a portable audio device, tape recorder or stereo system is connected to your line-in jack. Some laptops also allow an external sound adapter to be connected via the USB port, instead of a line-in jack. You can then take in the audio and start using a software program to edit the sound.

5. Line-out Jack This is the reverse of a line-in jack. What happens here is that a sound signal is sent out from the laptop to an external device (with its own amplifier). An example would be a laptop output signal going to a music synthesizer.

Conclusion As you can see, there are a lot of ways you can boost laptop audio. You can connect manipulate sound by feeding it into a microphone jack, amplify sound by connecting a stereo system to the laptop or edit sound by using the line-in and line out jacks. If you’re interested in computer audio, you can pick up some good books on the topic and get yourself a high-end multimedia laptop. Until next time, good luck and happy computing!

Arhur Monderos is working in a company as antivirus software specialist and he runs his informative blog where he helps you to choose best antivirus software for you computer.

Travelling for a month in the Thailand southern and central islands, spending most of our time on the beach or underwater, we felt we need to get to know a bit of this country’s history and that is why we got to Ayutthaya.

The train’s journey from Bangkok took us only 1h but it was quite interesting as we sat opposite a Thai woman and her daughter which tried for the whole journey to talk to us (in Thai) leaving us exhausted to smile at her trying to explain that we would love to have a chat but we didn’t understand a thing of what she was saying and even when we took out our phrase book and pointed to her “sorry, I don’t understand” she was happy to carry on …. so why stopping her.

As usual, once arrived at the train station, we found ourselves surrounded once more by all taxi drivers but we decided to head on foot to see what would be our options. Just at the end of the small road opposite the train station, there was a ferry crossing the main river that encircles the heart of Ayutthaya and for only 4 THB dropped us to the other site.

After check in at the delightful Baan Lotus Guesthouse we determined to investigate the ruins of this World Heritage listed town (since1991) on two wheels: hiring a bicycle at just 30 THB each per daytime was absolutely the finest and more convenient way to enjoy a relaxing daytime zooming around the numerous historic sites, you only need to observe out not to bump into one of the few elephants taking tourists in and around the city.

There are thus numerous ruins to be seen in Ayutthaya which could sustain you occupied at least for a pair of days. We squeezed in our ‘tour de france’ several palaces generally within reach of the Grand Palace (included, called also the Ancient Palace), like the Wat Pra Si Sanphet, Wat Mahathat, Wat Ratchaburana, Wat Phra Ram, Wat Lokayasutharam (a big 42mt reclining Buddha) and few more, enough to absorb the history of this put and leave us some time to get our hands on some tasty bbq prawn and other delicious dishes at the local night market.

Definitely magical a visit to the ruins when the sun goes down, you will be amazed by the colours’ tone reflected by the sunset.

We were lucky to catch a glimpse of this 2mt long reptile (no idea how it is called) roaming around the ruins at Phra Ram Park.

Arhur Monderos is working in a company as antivirus software specialist and he runs his practical blog where he helps you to choose best antivirus software for you computer.

Has your PC performance degraded due to continuous virus attacks and other malware infections? Although the market boasts of various anti-virus tools, there are free versions of antivirus applications that can be downloaded for safety of your computer. Installation of simple anti-virus software can be a great option if you do not intend to buy an anti-virus software application.

What exactly is an Antivirus Software?

Antivirus software is a computer application that is designed to identify, obstruct and eliminate computer viruses or any other malware (harmful applications) that might be dangerous for your computer security.

How does an Antivirus Software really work?

Usually any anti virus software will primarily scan your computer for presence of before known viruses that are already defined in the virus dictionary. The computer scans through all your files to discover known viruses to diagnose doubtful behavior existing in any computer programs. Once detected the infections can be deleted or quarantined on the authority of the seriousness of the infection.

What should I expect from my free Antivirus software? Download your free Antivirus software from a secure website, or else you can end up having additional virus infections and spyware attacks. Choose a software program that is easy and quick to download. Choose an anti-virus program with simple and easy-to-use features that will spare you all the technical jargon but will do a great job at virus removal and protection.

Make confident your free Antivirus software is efficient in the essential removing and quarantine of virus and malware infection.Look for other features, like Live updates for virus definitions and removing of malware.Many Antivirus programs come with spyware and malware protection, select the one that gives you the maximum benefits.

Try to use: Avast This software, which shows sufficient and good enough virus detection and removal, comes with a 60-day trial, after which you must register. A completely free version of this antivirus software requires your email address. Although the performance is not bad, it is not easy-to-navigate and does not provide a progress bar that indicates the progress of the scanning process.

AOL Active Virus Shield

This software is one of the most easy to use and most efficient antivirus programs available for free. However the only hurdle is that the installation of this software requires an email activation code that you can get only once you have registered online. The virus detection rate is impressive. It also provides an active virus shield that guarantees real-time security for your computer. So the process might be time consuming, but it is surly worth the wait.

Avira AntiVir

AntiVir is relatively popular and efficient software that is very fast which comes at the cost of thorough scanning however. One of the disadvantages of Avira is the terribly annoying full-screen pop-ups that open up at random intervals. Overall the virus detection and protection is good enough for it to be ranked at the second position in our list.

Norton Antivirus

Norton Antivirus is one of the finest antivirus applications that is extraordinarily efficient on blocking viruses and spyware with advanced protection. This antivirus software not just detects offline virus and spyware and defend the PC from infections but is also dynamic in the background while you are surfing the net. One of the extra perks of this software is that it also scans and cleans all email and immediate messaging attachments that provides you safety from receiving viruses and also prevents the spreading of the infection to others. The Norton Antivirus also checks for fresh updates continuously and automatically blocks fresh and emerging threats.

Avast

This software, which shows sufficient and good enough virus detection and removal, comes with a 60-day trial, after which you must register. A completely free version of this antivirus software requires your email address. Although the performance is not bad, it is not easy-to-navigate and does not provide a progress bar that indicates the progress of the scanning process.

Panda Antivirus

Panda Antivirus is an application that offers stable, quick and long term protection against all types of viruses and spyware. This software does an efficient job with virus detection and removal. The daily updates of this application ensure you are protected against all new threats that appear around the World Wide Web.

If you think your computer may be infected, take all necessary steps to clear your system and avoid infecting other computers.

There are various anti virus software programs available to choose from. Some of these anti virus software programs are free, but a few programs require a monthly or yearly fee. Anti virus software is used to protect your valuable computer systems from viruses, trojans and adware.

Step 1 Be cautious about what disks and files you accept from other people.

Step 2 Don’t reuse disks that have been in other computers, don’t download files from insecure sites, and don’t open e-mail attachments unless you are expecting them. Be wary of messages and attachments, even from people you know, with vague subject lines and contents, such as ‘Check this’ or ‘See these pics!!!’

Step 3 Obtain an antivirus program to more safely share disks, download files from the Internet and open e-mail attachments.

Step 4 If your system gets a virus, visit your virus-scan software manufacturer’s Web site and install any virus updates that are available. Then run the software. The software may not be able to delete the virus, but it may be able to identify it.

Step 5 Search the Web for information regarding your specific virus by typing the name of the virus or its associated file into a search engine, followed by the word ‘virus.’ For example, ‘Melissa virus,’ ‘BubbleBoy virus,’ and so on.

Step 6 Download and install any software patches or other programs that will help you eliminate the virus. Or follow any instructions you find on deleting the virus manually.

Step 7 Run another virus scan to make confident the virus was dealt with properly.

Step 8 Employ extra caution when you receive attachments that end in the commonly used extensions .doc, .exe, .com, .xls or .ppt. Never open attachments that end in .vbs or .js, since a typical user would never have a reason to open these files.