This is an amazing by-product of social networks. The ability for users to identify and kill viruses, worms, trojan horses, etc. These types of unique social network ecosystems reflect activity existant in the natural world.

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“Social networks have built-in antibodies…their users,” said Sean Sullivan of the Finnish security company F-Secure. “Compare the Twitter attack to a malicious attack of yesteryear that took weeks or even months to develop. This peaked and ebbed in two and a half hours,” Sullivan said.

That’s not to say that spammers don’t love sites like Twitter, because price cialis all they care about is finding some sucker to buy their product. A two-hour flood of spams is “great”, as far as they are concerned. But, it’s an interesting concept regarding worms and other malware on such sites.

Thoughts?  Comments?  Leave them in the comment area below.  Thanks.

As noted in a recent MSNBC article:

Authorities free cialis investigating the 2008 crash of Spanair flight 5022 have discovered a central computer system used to monitor technical problems in the aircraft was infected with malware.

An internal report issued by the airline revealed the infected computer failed to detect three technical problems with the aircraft, which if detected, may have prevented the plane from taking off, according to reports in the Spanish newspaper, El Pais.

us bank ach department

Flight 5022 crashed just after takeoff from Madrid-Barajas International Airport two years ago today, killing 154 and leaving only 18 survivors.

Out of the box, Windows defaults to hiding the file extension in folder listings, instead relying on the file’s icon to convey the file type to the user. The “bad guys” have taken advantage of this, by making you think the file is of one type, when it’s really an executable program designed to infect your system.

Is this “report” a document you can view,
or a trojan designed to infect your system?

Fortunately, it’s an easy fix.

Display any folder in Windows (for example, click the “start” button and then select “My documents”, or “Documents”, depending on your Windows version), select “Tools” and then “Folder options” from the menu. A dialog box will appear, with several tabs at the top. Select the “View” tab.

From the list of “advanced settings”, make sure that “hide extensions for known file types” is unchecked.

Now, why is this important? Consider the recent flood of spam I’ve been getting lately, which consists of an e-mail supposedly telling me that the “updated report” is attached. By default, the file will look something like this:

It looks pretty much like a document of some sort, called “report”. Double-click it to “look at the report” and instead, you will run a program which try to infect your system. (Hopefully, it won’t succeed, as you should have all your protections in place. But, why chance it?)

However, with that item unchecked, it will look like this:

Note the “.exe” at the end of the name.  That tells you that it’s a Windows executable, and you shouldn’t click it unless you know it’s legit.

To make things cialis no rx worse, the “bad guys” sometimes give the filename what looks like two extensions. For example, they may call the file “naked_lady.jpg.exe”, knowing that it will appear as “naked_lady.jpg” if extensions are hidden, making it appear even more like a picture instead of an executable.

a conference for information security.  You pass the IBM booth where they’re giving out free USB thumb drives with some marketing material, and you pick one up.  Think you’re safe?  Think again.

Even IBM can make mistakes.

At the recent Australian Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT) 2010 conference, IBM handed out USB thumb free cialis drives with a keylogger virus attached to the setup program.

Now, probably all the major anti-virus/anti-malware programs out there have known about this particular infection for years, so you would probably be “safe” in the sense that your up-to-date anti-virus program would warn you about the infection, but it just points out further the need to keep your programs up to date.

There are numerous articles on the ‘net with further details.  You can read SC Magazine’s article, ESET’s article, or search Google News for other links.