BT’s customer services’ Twitter account has been used to spread a phishing attack. Twitter users have been claiming that BT Care has been hacked, but BT said this is not the case. "The BT Care Twitter account has not been hacked. There is a suspected phishing attack which has affected a small number of our followers," said a BT spokeswoman. http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/10/30/238357/twitter-phishing-attack-disguised-as-bt.htm?
Online tat bazaar ebay.co.uk was blocked for much of yesterday because OpenDNS wrongly labelled auction pages on the site as phishing pages. Individual items, with addresses starting cgi.ebay.co.uk, were unavailable to anyone using the system, or using an ISP which uses the system. Instead surfers saw this error message: "Phishing Site Blocked Phishing is a fraudulent attempt to get you to provide personal information under false pretenses." Several threads in forums reported the issue and explained how to manually restore access. The problem has now been fixed, according to a poster in OpenDNS’s own support forum. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/30/ebay_opendns_block/? http://forums.opendns.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=5317&page=2
The recipe is simple. Take as many mobile phone developers, hackers and builders that you can find; put them in The Great Hall at Imperial College; add a liberal helping of heavyweight companies talking about new tools, developer aids and techniques to program mobile phones during the day; then challenge them to come up with "something new". Leave this to simmer as hackers work through the night and have everyone present their new programs to the rest of the conference the next day. That sums up the Over the Air hackathon. Now in its second year of bringing together the … Continue reading Tech Know: How to hack a handset
Sanford "Spamford" Wallace, of course, was the original "spam king" back in the 1990s. Despite his claim to have reformed at one point, he apparently has been spamming various social networks and advertising spyware. Back in 2004, the FTC investigated him and fined him $4 million. Last year, MySpace won a $234 million judgment against him. Wallace responded by disappearing. At one point, even his lawyer couldn’t find him. Earlier this year, when Facebook sued him for spamming their users as well, it seemed unlikely that he would bother to respond. Surprising pretty much everyone, he showed up in court, … Continue reading Sanford Wallace Loses Again; Owes Facebook $711 Million
Wish me luck. I removed MS09-058 security update (released by Microsoft earlier this month). I keep getting BSOD 0x1000008e each time I will click "Send/Receive" button in Outlook. I’ve done memtest, diagnostic test, re-insert the memory sticks and clean-boot (also used Dell diagnostics tool) but nothing is helping or showing that any of my devices or software and drivers is to fault. I went thru removing AV and firewall software but no joy. I’ll see if MS09-058 is the culprit. If it is… then I got a friend who will try it too because he’s seeing the same issue – … Continue reading I removed MS09-058 security update in Vista
Kaspersky unveiled a new tool on Thursday called "Krab Krawler" that analyzes the millions of tweets posted on Twitter every day and blocks any malware associated with them. The tool looks at every public post as it appears on Twitter, extracts any URLs in them and analyzes the Web page they lead to, expanding any URLS that have been shortened, Costin Raiu, a senior malware analyst at Kaspersky, said in an interview. The company is scanning nearly 500,000 new unique URLs that appear in Twitter posts daily, he said. Of those, anywhere between 100 and 1,000 are malware attacks. Twitter … Continue reading Kaspersky tool detects malware in Twitter links
Trend Micro threat analysts found several phishing sites registered in China that target specific people or companies. The said email can customize phishing URLs using the names of intended recipients via a technique called "spear phishing." Spear phishing has been used by cybercriminals before in attacks that involved specific targets. In the previous post, "So Is It Twitter or Facebook?," for instance, cybercriminals exploited Twitter’s direct message function to inform users that their pictures were seen on another website, the link to which is embedded in the same message. The link led to a bogus Facebook page from which user … Continue reading Taiwan: Spear Phishers Target Gmail Users
Hypothetical example described in report much harder to pull off in reality, company says Amazon said today that it has taken steps to mitigate a security issue in its cloud computing infrastructure that was identified recently by researchers from MIT and the University of California at San Diego. The report described how attackers could search for, locate and attack specific targets in Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) because of certain underlying vulnerabilities in the infrastructure.[…] In response, Amazon spokeswoman Kay Kinton said today that the report describes cloud cartography methods that could increase at attacker’s probability of launching a rogue … Continue reading Amazon downplays report highlighting vulnerabilities in its cloud service
Service finds relevant public content from friends and contacts Google has released a beta version of a search tool aimed at users of social networking sites. The company said at the Web 2.0 Summit last week that the ability to search Twitter feeds will be added in a few months, but has surprised many by getting it out so soon. Microsoft’s Bing engine started social networking searches last week. "Today we are rolling out a new experiment on Google Labs called Google Social Search that helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle," said Google in … Continue reading Google rushes out Social Search tool
The official newspaper of China’s ruling communist party has accused Google of seeking "malicious revenge" after a malware warning appeared by one of its Web sites in Google’s search results. The Google notice, which said the books section of the People’s Daily site could contain malware, appeared last week and prevented some visits to the Web page because its link redirected to a Google warning, according to a local media report also posted by the People’s Daily. A site representative was cited in the report as blaming "malicious revenge from Google" and saying the paper would take actions against such … Continue reading Google accused of ‘malicious revenge’ in China
