I remember very well the competing worms that came out in early 2004, Netsky and Bagel (Beagle) and to a degree Mydoom as well. One would try to uninstall the other as they fought for control of a pc. They were done by competing gangs and were literally waging a turf war with home (and business computers.) The same seems to be happening with the latest round of plug ‘n play (worms) viruses (bots).
Tag: Windows
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Qemu Windows XP install
Well, I alluded yesterday to a struggle with installing Windows XP under Qemu. Here are some details on the long and (still winding) road. At this point I have a working XP install running under Qemu but, I’ve run out of disk space (2G) and need more space before I can upgrade it to SP2. Note that I have not installed any third party software, just the base OS. Well…. I did have a long way around to get there….
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Adobe Acrobat vulnerabilities….
According to The Register among other sources, there is a vulnerability in all Acrobat and Reader software prior to the following safe release numbers: Windows and Mac Reader users please install 7.0.3 or 6.0.4 to be fixed (all other 7 series and 6 series versions are vulnerable). Acrobat users on Windows or Mac should update to either 7.0.3, 6.0.4 or 5.0.10 (again, any other 7.x 6.x or 5.x version is vulnerable.) Linux and Solaris reader users should upgrade to 7.0.1 to be secure.
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Microsoft’s quick response to network worms….
This is an ironic title because frankly, Microsoft has seemed to be slow in solutions for the recent zotob worm. Of course, they announced the vulnerability and accompanying update to solve the issue to begin with, but after the virus started propagating what do we see from Microsoft? They have a page titled What you should know about Zotob
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Zotob worm bites big media outlets
According to several reports there are several big media outlets seeing what is reported as the zotob worm which exploits a Microsoft Windows vulnerability (MS05-039) disclosed last week. There seems to be no better way for something to make the news than for it to affect the companies that bring us the news…. CNN for one is reporting that the worm has affected their networks as well as ABCnews and the New York Times. The Caterpillar Company is also mentioned.
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Boot discs
I’ve been using a site the last two days that I thought others might find useful. If you don’t know about it already, it’s bootdisk.com. They have available for download all sorts of Dos, Windows and Linux boot discs.
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Junk mail can be REALLY nasty
As if you needed another reason to not like SPAM ( no, not the hormel product, we’re talking junk mail here.) A couple days ago I mentioned a post at the sans institute talking about an email that was circulating and the link within that email took you to a malicious site (redirected) and attempted to exploit one of the recently disclosed Windows vulnerabilities. The Security Fix talks about another in the recent round of expoit attempts and this one comes disguised as junkmail.
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Computer security software nets $2.6 Billion over last two years.
SecurityFix is talking about the computer security industry. Further, computer users spend $9 billion a year on computers repairs from spyware and antivirus. This reminds me of a recent story of a man that threw out a perfectly good machine because it was infested with spyware. For starters, I do computer repair. I charge $40/ hour and even at that rate I’ve had people balk at 3-4 hours of heavy cleaning versus the Dell ads. How many people take this route instead of repairs? It’s hard to say overall. In his blog, Brian Krebs lays part of the blame at Microsoft’s door and I think rightly so.
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Zotob details
Here are some details on the zotob worm (s) culled from several sources….
It copies itself to the Windows system folder as BOTZOR.EXE, it modifies the hosts file to frustrate attempts to access antivirus sites. The .b variant copies itself as csm.exe in the Windows System folder. Both variants create a Mutex so that only one copy can run at a time.
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Hylafax / hylamonster how to
Hylafax is a linux server application that can be configured to be the central fax gateway for your business (or home.) Essentially it can deal with queing and sending faxes and receiving them. Faxes can be saved as tiff or pdf files.