Technical Tidbits™

Lot’s going on and trying to keep up with this changing security landscape!

Just in from a LinkedIn friend from Trend Micro group:

Trend Micro Security Labs has discovered that malware authors are already using Christmas themes as a social engineering tactic in an effort to gain control over compromised machines.

This campaign uses email messages in the form of e-greetings, leading to supposed animated postcards.
These actually lead to a Trojan backdoor that has been distributed in previous malicious spam campaigns.
The email messages, spoofed to appear as though they have been sent from postcards.org, display an animated Christmas scene.

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Internet Evolution a tech site I belong to is having a contest regarding our top 5 predictions for 2009.

Here are mine that I posted today.

1. Twitter will either replace conventional messaging systems (AIM, Yahoo, etc), or the messaging systems will be adapted to facilitate the use of your twitter @twittername. (You can follow me: @debbiemahler)

2. There will be a IWMD (Internet Weapon of Mass Destruction) launched sometime during this year. It will be considered a mashup blended threat because it will take advantage of the security flaws in a multitude of web apps and will propagate through ad servers.

3. Google will post the Federal Budget for President-elect Obama proving that a) campaigning for a candidate can increase your business, and b) we just may be capable of transparency in government.

4. Steve Balmer will get hit with a pie (if not several) while giving a speech this year.

5. Microsoft will purchase Yahoo and ruin it like it does everything else giving Google a clear and leading advantage in the search engine business as well as advertising and free email.

So now it’s preserved on the web forever!

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In a related story to our alert on the O day exploit, Information Week quoted TrendMicro as saying this:

Trend Micro says that the toolkit related to this exploit is being sold in the Chinese underground community and that files associated with this attack have been designed to steal information such as online gaming credentials.

According to Virustotal, a file analysis service, only 20 out of 38 listed antivirus applications detected the information-stealing malware.

Trend Micro also says that victims of this attack could become infected with a rootkit. (Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212400523&cid=nl_IWK_daily_H)

Hey Trend? Any idea what’s causing your pop-ups on RUBotted? Or are you not concerned because I’m not a Chinese underground hacker?

But as an aside, I think I’m going to check my system for a rootkit just the same. Maybe that’s the RUbotted pop-ups??

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And last but not least, one of my favorite Big Brother Browsers, Google Chrome came out of beta.

Congratulations to Google. I still don’t trust it and still won’t use it! But congratulations just the same!

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