November 2009 - Posts
I’m still out traveling, so below is a personal vignette about social engineering. A couple of weeks ago, I headed off to a murder mystery free form game. If you’ve never been to one, it’s a ton of fun. The basic theme is that everyone plays a role in
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Did you ever wonder what it’s like to work at Microsoft? Click on the link below to check out a humorous parody of what we all go through every day. Click here to watch the video (offsite).
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While I am out, I am posting some random stuff from around the web. From AppleGeeks :
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I’m currently on vacation in South America* so I thought I’d pre-write a few stories about how spam/malware relates to real life. We all know that a big trend in recent years with malware is social engineering. Social engineering is an attempt to
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I am going to be traveling in Peru for the next little while, but fear not! I shall still be blogging! I have written a few posts in advance to entertain you all that shall become publically visible over the next few days. Enjoy.
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This probably belongs in the “Well, no kidding” category but I thought I would post it anyhow. Since near the beginning of this year, I have been tracking how much email our filters classify as malware. I then took those values, broke them
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Win32/Rustock is a multi-component family of rootkit-enabled backdoor trojans, which were historically developed to aid in the distribution of spam e-mail. First discovered sometime in early 2006, Rustock has evolved to become a prevalent and pervasive
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From the Register : A botnet that was once responsible for an estimated third of the world's spam has been knocked out of commission thanks to researchers from security firm FireEye. After carefully analyzing the machinations of the massive botnet, alternately
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One of the pieces of conventional wisdom that goes through my head is that if you install pirated versions of software, then your computer is more likely to be infected with malware. It makes sense; in order for spammers/malware authors to take
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All Spammed Up has a new post up referencing an article that security researchers have issued a report indicating that Spain is the country with the most infected computers, at 44.5%. The United States is second at 14.4%. The countries with
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For the very first time since I created this blog back in July of 2006, I am changing it’s title. It is no longer “Terry Zink’s Anti-spam Blog”, it is now “Terry Zink’s Anti-malware Blog”. I have not moved out of spam. Instead, I have decided
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Setbacks and Triumphs The domain registration task became exponentially more challenging on March 4, 2009, with the discovery of Worm:Win32/Conficker.D. Investigators reverse-engineered the new variant and determined that it was programmed to generate
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The Conficker Working Group Is Born In January 2009, representatives from a number of security research companies and domain registrars, along with the anti-botnet Shadowserver Foundation, began discussing how best to implement a defensive Domain Name
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One of my favorite stories in the recent edition of the Microsoft Security and Intelligence Report v7 , pp 29-32, is that of the story of Conficker. I thought I would repost it here because it illustrates the problem of Conficker and the way the industry
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Every 6 months or so, Microsoft releases its Security and Intelligence Report for the previous 6 months of the year. SIRv7 is now available here . This is a very comprehensive document covering topics from the entire threat landscape that
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