Like the Asian Earthquake Tsunami two years ago, it is only a matter of time before Nigerian/419 scammers start taking advantage of the recent devastating earthquake in Haiti, by soliciting funds for “relief efforts”. The unfortunate part is, whoever gave money to these scammers would only be relieving money from their wallets and the donation will not reach the victims who desperately need them.
Learn what to be on the look out for, and find out more at the source.
Internet security experts are warning of a new rash of malware attacks that can hijack the security settings of a wide variety of devices on a local area network, even when they are hardened or don’t run on Windows operating systems.
Once activated, the trojan sets up a rogue DHCP, or dynamic host configuration protocol, server on the host machine. From there, other devices using the same LAN are tricked into using a malicious domain name system server, instead of the one set up by the network administrator. The rogue DNS server sends the devices to fraudulent websites that in many cases can be hard to identify as impostors.
This kind of malware is definitely dangerous because it affects systems that themselves are not vulnerable” to the trojan, all you need is one system infected in the network and it will affect a lot of other nonvulnerable systems.
Of course, one way to thwart the attack is to hardwire DNS server settings into your iPhone, computer or other net-connecting device. This will direct it to bypass the rogue DNS server even if the device is unfortunate enough to get its internet connection from the impostor DHCP server.
Source: The Register
The Conficker/Downadup worm managed to slither onto millions of PCs worldwide at its height, but after it initially infected a computer it only really acted to spread itself, and didn’t cause further harm. Until now.
Symantec reports today that it has found a new variant of the virulent worm that will identify antivirus software or security analysis tools running on the infected PC, and attempt to shut down those programs. This is a strong signal that the worm’s mysterious creators haven’t abandoned their creation in the face of worldwide attention, as some in the industry have theorized, but may still have plans to make a buck off their work.
Source: PcWorld
FireFox has released a new version on March 4. It addresses 5 security issues, and several issues found in Firefox 3.0.6. Please upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible, if your not using FireFox why not give it a try. You can download the latest version by visiting: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Windows 7 is moving from Beta stage to RC (Release Cantidate) stage and it should be no surprise that the Release Candidate for Windows 7 will have quite a few changes, many under the hood so to speak but also many visible. So far they are mentioning about 36 changes on the MSDN Blog. I am really excited about Windows 7 , and I can’t wait to get my hands on the new build rumered to released the end of February. So hopefuly today is the day.
