Over the last couple weeks I’ve gotten persistent and annoying spams from a place that is currently at broadcastemailcompany.com (although they have had variations on their domain during that time.) broadcastemailgroupcom and broadcastemailcorporation.com are some of their other recent aliases. They claim in the email that their offer is only for non-profit groups and to excuse the inconvenience if you have received this by mistake. Over the last weekend though, I received 7-10 of these on various postmaster@ and root@ addresses (Plus one sales@ address) for the various domains that I either own or administer for others.
Tag: time
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Hiding malware may evade antivirus
Sans had an interesting malware analysis this morning about a blob that appeared to be ascii text (gibberish) that was retrieved by a piece of malware. It turns out that the ascii text was a cleverly encoded exe file (windows executable or program file.) It took several iterations of their analysis to uncover the actual file. A followup referred to a study of “hiding” malware in various Microsoft Word supported formats and how successful (or unfortunately UNsuccessful) several antivirus programs tested were able to identify it. This was performed by running the files through virus total and the virus was the EICAR test pattern.
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More Microsoft Patch problems MS06-042
This has been one of the “problem child” patches this time around and it looks as though it’s worse than initially thought. Apparently, instead of “just” crashing IE SP1 when viewing compressed http 1.1 web pages on WinXP SP1 or Windows 2000 SP4…. as stated in Microsoft’s bulletins, this could also lead to a buffer overflow allowing for code execution. Microsoft is saying that they are not aware of that vulnerability being exploited or impacting customers at this time. The issue that was originally reported is detailed in this knowledge base article.
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Google Coupons and improving Picasa
There are a couple of stories on the “Google front” today. First up Coupons tied into Google location searching (maps.) More details at the Adwords blog. (BTW, this is open to US businesses, an Adwords account is not a requirement.) It looks like they’ll put up printable coupons for businesses. There seem to be quite a few possibilities for extending this idea. (More coverage here.) The next item puts to rest a rumor from some time back. It seems as though at one point in time, Google was interested in Riya, who specializes in image recognition (hey – that’s Bob in that picture.)
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MS06-040 update
MS06-040 is one of last weeks Windows updates and is the one that was probably the biggest target for “wormable” activity. There’s a good deal of news from over the weekend with regards to this. First: Snort signatures, the MS06-040 exploit was spotted actively “in the wild”, and of course, our perennial friends in the spamming world didn’t waste much time in making use of this one.
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Massive Dell Laptop Battery recall
This is worth reading if you’ve got a Dell laptop. There have been numerous stories in recent months of Dell laptops exploding into flames and it looks as though now over 4 million batteries from their inspiron, Latitude and Precision laptops are being recalled. The manufacture dates range from April 2004 to July 18, 2006. There is a Dell site for this issue www.dellbatteryprogram.com. Realistically, the new lithium ion batteries are trying to pack a large power density into a small space and if something goes wrong, it can go BAD wrong….
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RFID Passports
Looks like RFID passports are coming very soon for the US. It was probably just a matter of time, but in light of some of the risks in the current implementation, I thought it might be delayed. The most disturbing of the security risks (as if cloning of a passports rfid is not concerning…) is the possibility that the unshielded rfid could be used to trigger the detonation of an explosive. Since RFID is relatively short range, this means that it would be possible for terrorists to target Americans specifically by using an RFID trigger that was looking for the specific earmarks of a US Passport.
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Collection company….
I’m quite frustrated this evening. Another long day of computer problems and tonight I come in to around the tenth call from a collection agency. The kicker in this case is that it’s not for me, but for someone I’ve never heard of. Over the years we’ve had a fair amount of credit card debt and have worked our way to within about one payment of being out from under. All with no defaults, no collection agencies, etc. We’ve followed the rules in other words. And the last 2 weeks we’ve been harrassed by a collection agency looking for someone that we’ve never met that I can only assume gave our phone number. The collection agency is….
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The pendulum swings… looking at Audio hardware
I’m such a sucker for technology sometimes…. I’m into too many things it seems. I do computer repair which can keep things fairly busy, I keep up with this and a slew of other websites which is another job in itself. (Not to mention the genealogy hobby (or addiction/affliction?)) We’re fairly involved at Church… and then there is piano and music. I’ve been teaching piano now for about 9 years which is hard to believe in itself and over that time other obligations have taken their share of time, but now the pendulum is swinging back where I’m really getting in more time to try to improve my playing in one particular area. Towards that end I wanted to get some recordings of a few other pianists to dissect their approaches….. well, that’s taken me to another place – audio hardware.
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HDR – High Dynamic Range – Images under linux
HDR – recently I heard someone talking about this with regards to digital imaging. The idea is that you have three identical images (landscapes) taken from a stationary (tripod) camera. The only difference is the exposure times vary. Together you can blend them to create a more impressive final picture. Yes, I just talked about fake photos and digital imaging. This, to me, is in a different class of photo editing…. enhancement(?) – well… anyway. There are a number of ways to do this, photoshop, I understand has support for doing this and it’s possible under linux as well with the Gimp.