So who doesn’t love YouTube. Now I didn’t realize that YouTube was actually down this past Sunday for about a 2 hour period. It all started when some videos were posted that was offensive to Pakistan. After getting the order from the telecommunications ministry directing that YouTube be blocked, the Pakistan Telecom went even further. Either by accident or by design, the company broadcast instructions worldwide claiming to be the legitimate destination for anyone trying to reach YouTube’s range of Internet addresses.
The security weakness lies in why those fake instructions, which took YouTube offline for the two hour period on Sunday, were believed by routers around the world. This is due to Hong Kong based PCCW which provides the Internet link to Pakistan Telecom, did not stop the false broadcast which is what most large providers in the United States and Europe do.
It is not the first time this has happened. Hopefully it won’t happen again. I like many probably never knew it happened. But the one thing we must question is, did they do that on purpose or was it a mistake amplified by 50 times?
Stay safe and have a great Wednesday!
Hope your weekend has gone well for everyone. Tonight, I’m blogging about why attackers pick on FaceBook and MySpace users. Why do you think they do? Well if your answer is the sheer number of users of FaceBook and MySpace, that will tell you why. Attackers want to make the biggest bang with their attacks.
Most people who surf the Internet do it with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (versions 6 or 7). Attackers are starting to exploit vulnerabilities in several widely installed IE plug-ins to install their malicious software when users are coerced or tricked into visiting one of several Web sites. That my friends is called social engineering and probably is being done through spam e-mail.
Symantec this past Friday was seeing malicious sites that are running exploits on some Internet Explorer plug-ins in a set of ActiveX controls produced by Aurigma, a tech company who’s image transfer browser plug-in is licensed and distributed by some heavy weight web portals to help the users upload pictures. Among these heavy weight sites include FaceBook and MySpace.Symantec warns that if visitors don’t have the Aurigma plug-ins installed, the sites will look for other vulnerable IE plug-ins, including two recently discovered from Yahoo and another for QuickTime that was recently patched by Apple last month. I go to many sites to gather information for stories and one is Brian Krebs who writes a security blog for the Washington Post. Click here to read his story on this topic and included in his story is an image of what the malicious page that people are directed that asks for their login credentials. If you notice the .cn at the end of the web address in this picture, the .cn is a country code where the page is hosted. .CN is for China. .HK is another one that seems to be host to many malicious pages. .HK is Hong Kong.
Well, have a great week. We are in the last week of February and the weather has to be getting better soon. Stay safe and we’ll talk again later this week.
Well a couple of days ago the WordPress website was attacked using a Denial of Service attack (DoS). I understand there were times that some of us were unable to actually log in to our blogs. I didn’t have any problem on my account but I’m sure it was a timing thing for me. Hopefully not too many were affected by this attack.
Not really sure why WordPress was attacked. In a DoS attack, a website is sent many many requests, too many to handle, from many bots that are out there. They can be instructed to actually send requests…so many in fact that the website can’t handle the volume of visits to the site. Of course if many of us would keep our PC’s clean, then we wouldn’t have so many bots to do their malicious deeds.
Hope you have enjoyed reading my blog. It’s pretty dry, a bit boring, down right blah. But if you do the things I suggest, then there would be less malicious activity. As it is for now, there are literally millions of bots out there being controlled by different organized groups. If you remember Estonia DoS attacks late last year, this was another high profile use of bots. They can be used to profit, attack for reasons of extorting money, or even for political reasons.
My point in this story is to learn as much as you can about computer security so you aren’t either a victim of these attackers or you can surely reduce your risk out there. Patching is probably the best thing you can do on your PC. Being careful where you are surfing too also makes a difference. Don’t surf porn or P2P sites file sharing sites. Use some of the tools I suggest for your browser and other things. Reading is your best defense. Keeping informed. Unite, patch, and be happy!!
Take care and have a great Friday and weekend. I know I will!! Rock chalk Jayhawk!! GO KU!!!!
Hope all is well with everyone this Saturday afternoon. If you’ve been a reader of my blog, you know that social engineering happens everyday from your email inbox. If you saw in your emails some Valentines greetings from some strange and they were either directing you to some random website or they had a malicious attachment like an Adobe PDF document. Always question anything in your inbox that has an attachment or is trying to direct you to somewhere you probably don’t want to go.
The social engineering used to spread botnets like Storm and now the Mega D botnet, sometimes may trick you. There are other ways attackers are going after more victims. I got my first SMS text message spam this past week when in Atlanta, Georgia. It was trying to direct me to a website to go visit. I just read this weekend in the Kansas City Star that local residents were getting spam SMS messages on their phones from a local bank.
Attackers are finding more ways to try and part you away from your money. Be aware that you will continue to get nasty malicious emails in your inbox, but you will possibly be getting text messages that are just spam messages just sent a different way. If you use the messaging systems like AOL’s Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, or MSN Messenger, you probably have seen unsolicited messages, many from women who want men to join them for their webcam shows. My advice for any type of spam is the same. Delete it. Don’t respond to it. Delete it. Protect yourself against spam no matter how it is delivered to you.
Stay safe and have a better weekend than I’m about to have with a Winter storm approaching. Bye for now and we’ll talk again next week.
Well just yesterday we got an alert about an Adobe Reader flaw that is being exploited in the wild. Adobe came out with an updated version of Adobe Reader on Wednesday of this week. You want to upgrade to version 8.1.2 now. These exploits have been found in both banner ads and also spam e-mail attachments. These dirty rotten criminal hacker scoundrels are attacking this application because it is so widely used. Most people don’t update their version of the Adobe Reader.
If you are a reader of my blog, you know there are tools out there to check to see that you have your software up to date. The one I really like is the Shavlik Google gadget. It runs and checks many of these third party applications and tells you that you have an update. If you use this Google gadget, run it and patch. The one thing you can do that will protect you the most is to patch your applications.
Patch and be happy. Stay safe and have a great weekend!!
Now I tell you this, I am no expert on MySpace. I don’t have a MySpace page. I don’t plan on getting a MySpace page. But you may have a MySpace page or your kids may have a MySpace page. And if you do, this story may have caught your attention. Not too long ago, 567,000 photos that were marked private on MySpace were accessed, copied, and now are available on a 17 gig torrent.
One of the things MySpace does to protect minors against pedophiles is to mark photos posted on their MySpace page private so only “friends” they have can access these photos. Adults who have MySpace pages also can mark photos either public or private. If they are marked private, it works the same way. Only people they have designated certain “friends” are able to access these private photos. Due to a vulnerability in the MySpace private photos, some 567,000 were extracted from the MySpace files. Now one might wonder how could MySpace not see hundreds of thousands of requests from one IP address isn’t seen. A 17 gig file is huge not to see.
Oh well. Supposedly this has been fixed. But the lesson should be this. If you ever post pictures that are supposedly private on the Internet, someday, someway, their may be a possible software vulnerability that allows someone to steal these pictures and they will live forever as a file that can be accessed. This is something I try and suggest. Never post anything that you wouldn’t mind being seen by everyone. I haven’t read any details, but I’m sure there are some nude pictures that have been posted and were assumed protected by being marked private. Well not so.
This is a good example of creating your own “need to know policy” where you don’t disclose anything about yourself online. Crooks are always looking for ways to steal information about you. If you have kids and they are on MySpace, you may want to warn them that if they had pictures marked private, there are thousands and thousands now that are public record. Some may be embarrassing, so warn them of the dangers of posting things on the Internet and don’t let people know too much about you. Protect your privacy by not disclosing anything without thoughtful consideration.
Take care and stay safe. Glad the Patriots lost! Rockchalk Jayhawk go KU!!
