More coverage is being given to the instant messaging worm that poses as a come on for a Santa Claus related site today. The only thing I think that I left out in last nights post was the name of the bug… IM.GiftCom.All On visiting the advertised site a rootkit is installed on the visiting machine.
Tag: post
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Yahoo Search Shortcuts
I haven’t used yahoo search too much in quite a while, but there is an interesting post in their search blog about Yahoo Shortcuts. An example is typing in !ebay lamps takes you to ebay.com and searches for lamps. (Part of me is asking, why not just go to ebay and search for lamps??? – but there are some interesting uses for this within a toolbar – I can imagine it would get you there a step or two more quickly.)
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How common is data theft?
According to this securityfix post it’s a daily occurance. The email that he cites was from a woman who was informed by a company that a data backup had been “lost track of”. There is a web site that chronicles such data security breaches. privacyrights.org. It’s certainly worth a look.
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More on WordPress 2.0
I’m finding a bit more about the upcoming WordPress 2.0 release. I haven’t had time to test the RC in the 5 minutes since the last post, but I have been able to read a few sites. It looks like most of the big changes are “under the hood”, which sounds promising. It sounds as though more interesting extensions might be more easily do-able…
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Takedown phishing sites
Sunbeltblog has a good post on a group that helps “take bad guys out”. The Internet Crime Provention and Control Institute (Link expired). Basically, they will take submissions of complaints and assist in getting sites taken down. A good example would be phishing sites, maybe servers hosting illegal content, stolen information, etc. etc.
Or, perhaps a machine is spewing out viral, nigerian 419 scam or other material. That’s what the ICPCI is there to receive complaints on and coordinate “takedowns”. According to the sunbelt entry (a tip from a reader), they’re pretty effective at the takedowns (even when the site is hosted in places you would think makes it tougher.)
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Disinfecting a PC… part 2
Ok, the last post got a bit long with the hijackthis log, but I wanted to include the whole picture. I put a few comments in, but thought it might be useful to include the notes I took at the time. For starters I leave it unplugged from the network. (There is no network card in this machine.) It’s important when working on an infested PC to leave it isolated so that it can’t continue to spread viruses or spam or whatever it may be doing. Assume if it’s infested with something that it could be spewing out bad stuff. If you must, isolated it and prevent it from routing to the outside world… the safest is usually to leave the cable unplugged for the initial look over.
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Global White Space Reset (CSS/html)
This may not be useful to many people, but I thought it was interesting. If you do web design and use css you’ll probably like this… I found this post at leftjustified.net about a neat way to “reset” the padding and margin css information which can help for designing sites to display the same when using CSS. Unfortunately, many browsers have little quirks in displaying css, maybe they have strange default settings which cause css placement to look, well, strange, from one browser to another… in comes this little trick…
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Electronics and Surplus stuff
For some time I’ve meant to do a post on some of my favorite places to find odd electronics components (and surplus stuff…) Something about electronics components is that there’s so much potential… anyway, I just placed an order with All Electronics for a handful of odds and ends. They’re probably the newest place on my “I’ve got to look at the catalog when it comes in” list. You’ll find pretty much nothing (or very little) in the way of finished consumer electronics….
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Non-public database abuse
There is an interesting story at the SecurityFix on an individual who has been sentenced for using access to non-public LexisNexis searching to do background checks on, among other’s police who she though was investigating her for prostitution.
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Home Linux terrabyte backup system
This is something I’ve wanted to build for some time. I hadn’t actually thought about a terrabyte of storage, but… linux journal has the article on making your own home network backup storage solution using an old pc, linux and relatively cheap discs. The concept of any backup system is redundancy so that a single failure doesn’t take out your data.