Malware authors are always trying to trick you into opening their craptastic payloads, often using the latest news headlines. But it seems that they didn’t care for the volcano story a few weeks ago: Eyjafjallajökull, despite being arguably the biggest news story of the year so far, is simply too difficult to spell for most [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Spam and Malware category.
Amusing Spam
From: Buy Viagra? In USA Subject: Info for headgeek: 70% lowered prices today This link will lead you our shop © 2008-2010 many first killing exist. All rights reserved. Wow. I think I’m going to start a company named “many first killing exist, inc.” I think it’s safe to assume that it’s not taken in [...]
“The real dangers of PDF executable trickery”
If you pay any attention to computer security news, you’ve almost certainly heard of the recently-discovered PDF hack that allows an attacker to embed arbitrary commands in a PDF file. Well, it’s worse than you thought — another researcher has a proof-of-concept hack that allows an infected PDF to infect every PDF file on the [...]
“It’s official: Adobe Reader is world’s most-exploited app”
Poor Microsoft… they’ve lost yet another crown. (And yet another good reason to avoid the PDF format entirely.)
“Software Discovery is Broken”
How do you find good software? Industry veteran John Dvorak (no relation to the keyboard layout of the same name ) says you can’t, barring personal recommendations from other users. There are too many scammers out there. I’m sorry to say that I have to agree. I haven’t gone looking for much software by Internet [...]
“What are the Internet’s most dangerous search words? Bearshare and screensaver.”
Looking for love is an honorable pursuit, even if it’s “in all the wrong places.” Looking for screen savers… that’s another matter.
“Advanced Persistent Threats: Should your panties be in a bunch, and how do you un-bunch them?”
A good article, and one that will (to quote my sainted grandmother) “scare the pee-water right out” of anyone responsible for corporate-level security. But the main reason I wanted to mention it was for the excuse to put the amusing phrase “your panties in a bunch” into a blog title.
Amusing Spam
Spam messages are rarely amusing enough for me to post anymore, but this one takes the cake: Subject: Hegihten the qulaity of your ereictons with Soft (ialis. Biggest_bIowout_sale of \/aIium in our onIine pharmacy Sorry guys, but SpamBayes wasn’t fooled. You’ll have to do better than misspelled words and ASCII art to get past it.
“Slovak biker spat linked to rare destructive worm”
Wow, this is a blast from the past — a worm that overwrites the Master Boot Record (MBR) of the hard drive. I haven’t seen one of those since the early nineties. But believe it or not, that’s not really destructive… just fdisk /mbr to rebuild the MBR, and unless the worm has done a [...]
“In their words: Experts weigh in on Mac vs. PC security”
It’s a very long article, so I’ve only skimmed the answers that their chosen experts gave, but it’s very odd to me that the answers were so varied. Market share was brought up several times, as an argument for a Mac (or Linux, though that was barely mentioned), but others said that market share matters [...]