Blogs

Tags > malware

Four short links: 28 March 2013

What American Startups Can Learn From the Cutthroat Chinese Software Industry — It follows that the idea of “viral” or “organic” growth doesn’t exist in China. “User acquisition is all about media buys. Platform-to-platform in China is war, and it …

Seeing peril — and safety — in a world of connected machines

I’ve spent the last two days at Digital Bond’s excellent S4 conference, listening to descriptions of dramatic industrial exploits and proposals for stopping them. A couple of years ago Stuxnet captured the imagination of people who foresee a world of …

Four short links: 26 June 2012

SnapItHD -- camera captures full 360-degree panorama and users select and zoom regions afterward. (via Idealog) Iago (GitHub) -- Twitter's load-generation tool. AutoCAD Worm Stealing Blueprints -- lovely, malware that targets inventions. The worm, known as ACAD/Medre.A, is spreading through infected AutoCAD templates and is sending tens of thousands of stolen documents to email addresses in China. This one...

Four short links: 28 March 2012

MS Office Exploit In The Wild, Targeting Mac OS X -- This is one of the few times that we have seen a malicious Office file used to deliver Malware on Mac OS X. (via Hacker News) Please Do Not Take Down The Sality BotNet -- best responsible disclosure ever. 3Difficult -- I’m an industrial designer at heart, and...

Commerce Weekly: Facebook finds a mobile commerce partner

Bango will run Facebook's mCommerce platform, Google Wallet hacked, and PayPal pilots shopping walls. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)

Four short links: 30 December 2011

Hadoop Hits 1.0 -- open source distributed computation engine, heavily used in big data analysis, hits 1.0. Sparse and Low-Rank Approximation Wiki -- interesting technique: instead of sampling at 2x the rate you need to discriminate then compressing to trade noise for space, use these sampling algorithms to (intelligently) noisily sample at the lower bit rate to begin with....

Four short links: 19 July 2011

Tame.js -- async programming library for use with node.js and other V8 projects. (via Hacker News) The Rise of PDF Malware (Symantec) -- detailed whitepaper showing the incident rate, techniques, and evasion techniques of PDF malware. Despite the fact that the number of PDF CVEs [Common Vulnerability/Exposure] are close to Microsoft Office’s numbers, the amount of nonunique PDF attacks...

Four short links: 3 March 2011

Guangzhou City Map -- Chinese city maps: they use orthographic projection (think SimCity) and not satellite images. A nice compromise for usability, information content, and invisible censorship. (via Hacker News) Broken Windows, Broken Code, Broken Systems -- So, given that most of us live in the real world where some things are just left undone, where do we draw...

'Twas the Holiday Season in the Digital Age

'Twas a night during the holidays, when all through the house Everyone was connecting and using their mouse. The screens were alight and holding their stares, While holiday music from iTunes loudly blared.

ClamXav Follow-up: Test with Live Malware

I took a quick look at the free ClamXav anti-virus software for OS X last month. However, I didn't have any malware to test with it. Well, I found my archive of captive test malware and tried it out with ClamXav.

ClamXav: Free Anti-Virus for Your Mac - Help Protect Your PC Friends

The consensus seems to be that Mac OS X does not need anti-virus software. However, I thought about anti-virus in terms of Windows running as a Guest OS as well as people running Windows XP/Vista with whom I exchange documents. So, I took a look at the free ClamXav (based on the Open Source ClamAV proejct) as an anti-virus tool.

Our first big infection

At 7:30 eastern this morning, one of my brothers called to tell me that he is, "being attacked by hackers. My computer has hackers on it, and over 100 viruses, spywares and password stealing Trojans, and I don't even know...

That's Funny... I Don't Remember Installing MobileMe On Windows

Is Apple using malicious software installation tactics to market products to us we never had any intention of installing on our system? Seems that way to me...

Please Update Your Browser

A research study released last week measures the proportion of web users running the most updated and secure browsers. With drive-by-downloads increasingly popular with malware distributors, web surfing with an older version of a browser is getting riskier. The study is based on data from Google's search and web application server logs over an 18 month period (Jan-07 to Jun-08),...

Malware Centers and Offshoring

Most studies place China, Brazil, and Russia among the leading sources of conventional and web-based malware. Depending on the type of malware involved, there is a good chance that one of these three countries is among the leading suppliers. Malware from these countries reflect local Internet usage patterns. In Brazil, 75% of regular Internet users access online banking services so...