Tech a byte

Conficker's routine on the April 1st with its newest variant dubbed as "Conficker.C" is still a mystery to security researchers.

PCs infected with Conficker.c, the third version of the worm that first appeared late last year, will use a new communication scheme on April 1 to establish a link to the command-and-control servers operated by the hackers who seeded the malware. The date is hard-coded into the worm, which in turn polls any of a number of major Web sites, including Yahoo, for the date, said Stewart.

"So far, we haven't seen any evidence [on those machines] of what it will do April 1," added Stewart, although that's to be expected. "It's not April 1 yet, so they're not going to put something online, where it might be found. In fact, it's almost a little risky for us to try to look for those sites, since it might give away that we have some bots in their network."

However, on F-Scure's notes on their blog, nothing is likely to happen on the said date. Hopefully.

Gmail is already up after an outage occurred last Tuesday at approximately 0930 GMT leaving millions of people worldwide disrupted on their access for about two and a half hours.

Phishing Scam hits Twitter last week as users received direct messages from friends to open a blog which directed them to a bogus Twitter website, giving away their user name and password once they logged in. Website address may look like this:

http://twitter.access-logins.com/login

Note: Don't try to access above site


Though the hit is not as big compared to Myspace, still users are warned to be careful and be vigilant when encountering suspicious messages or websites.

Source: Twitter Blog

Malicious code circulating through spam messages in relation to Israel-Hamas conflict (Gaza War) was launched yesterday by spammers (which reportedly hosted in China) at around 9 a.m. EST.

Information about these spam messages

• These fake emails are disguised and appear to come from CNN with subject lines "Israel offers short respites from strikes".
• The body of the messages indicates a link to a legitimate-looking CNN website where a news story about the war can be found.
• This bogus website additionally contains a video of the said war and when user attempts to watch it, a pop-up message appears to tell the user to update their Flash player. This is not a legitimate update, but instead a malicious code will be downloaded and may cause serious problem.

Preventive measures to mitigate the security risks

• Keep antivirus updated.
• Do not open open nor unsolicited email messages and links.
• Do not visit untrusted websites.
• Obtain software applications/patches/updates directly from the vendor's website.