Incidents.org is reporting scanning for phpbb include vulnerabilities through Google. Apparently there is an IRC botnet being “cultivated”. They are scanning for versions of phpBB prior to 2.0.10, the current release is 2.0.18.
The new IRC bot scans for vulnerable systems using Google, when successful it announces that “oopz and sirh0t and Aleks g0t pwned u!”, and has UDP flooding and UDP/ICMP/TCP scanning capabilities.
The file phpbb_patch was found on exploited systems.
It looks like a list of Sony Music titles with the recent onerous DRM “rootkit” is being gathered. The Sunbelt blog has links to several lists. The EFF has a list here, there are two others though out there, here and here.
Among other things, another post mentions the stupid things Sony-BMG leadership has had to say on the matter…
“Most people, I think, don’t even know what a Rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”
and, it’s also noted the installer can be bypassed by pressing the shift key when loading the cd (to skip autorun.) (Does telling this actually violate the DMCA – spreading information on circumventing copy protection?)
It looks like Motorola is investing in a company that develops fuel cell technology for small devices.
According to the article the cells provide…
In an effort to educate more people on the value of open source software, there is the Looplist. The Looplist was highlighted in desktoplinux.com today. It’s essentially a user-collaborated WIKI listing Open Source applications which run on Windows based systems.
It sounds as though the first Apple x86 based systems may show up as early as January of 2006. This means interesting things for those that write open source software. I’ve seen discussions that when the move to x86 happens it will make it easier to port such projects as wine to the Apple platform.
Slashdot has an interesting story up about the background of the selection of Windows Defender. It seems that an Australian software developer had a product called Windows Defender which protected Windows users from malicious websites. Well a short while back he got a call from lawyers associated with Microsoft about trademark infringement over the use of Windows. As part of the deal he would quit using that name and turn over all rights to that name to Microsoft.
Here’s a quick fix for Windows 2000 and XP when using cleanmgr to clean out temporary files. I’ve run across many systems that it just freezes (or takes way too long) calculating space saved by compressing old files, or hangs just saying “compress old files”. Well, here’s one way to skip that step.
Sunbeltblog has a story about the “VideoC” video player… apparently they discovered this when visiting a site. A video starts to play and then abruptly stops and claims that “VideoC” player needs to install to view the clip. VideoC is not REALLY a video player just a clever way to get loads of spyware on your system.
In doing a routine Google for my name… I ran across a website which has my email address and too many others to count in a plain text file. The site is configured to allow browsing of all files/folders and the text file claims to be 1 of 2, and has reference to the name 1 million (1 million addresses?) The file is 9.8MB large. I haven’t done a wc -l to see how many entries there really are in this one. But the question came to mind what the best way to deal with this is? I guess my first step is contacting the site owner to have this removed? Ok – just did a cat | wc -l and there are exactly 500,000 email address in this file, what’s more I’ve stumbled across a directory that seems to have more email address information. MASSIVE AMOUNTS more for bulk mailing purposes in zipped text files categorized by service provider. (A directory for Bigfoot, hotmail, etc. for example.)
That most wonderful day of the month has come when we get an idea of what vulnerabilities we may see exploited…. Seriously, if you run Windows, go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com or ensure you have automatic updates if at all possible. This months most critical update relates to a vulnerability in the way windows renders (draws) images. It appears that an attacker could design a web page with images in such a way as to run arbitrary (anything they want) code (programs) on the victims computer, alter or view data, or simply control the machine (creating/removing user accounts, etc.)