Busy weeks...

VTM sent out my interview last Thursday at the 19 o'clock news. I will try to put it on my website somewhere next week. Also in the pipeline is an interview about security awareness and training at the end of next week in Data News. I've been very busy the last weeks and the next week will be also quit good filled up with our NOXS congress in Belgium and Luxembourg. I will try to put up some pictures afterwards. And .. my advice ... don't miss this congress if you are in the neighborhood!

VTM and SPAM.

Yesterday, I was interviewed by VTM (the biggest Belgian Commercial TV station) concerning the growing SPAM problem. However due to the large problems we have in Belgium these days with the car vendors VW and Opel and the amount of news this generates, VTM decided to put the interview on hold. Let's hope VTM will still broadcast the interview as it has real value to everybody especially for the home users. BTW VTM's newsroom is larger than I thought. ;-)

Virtual Worms in Second Life!

The online world of Second Life suffered a massive attack of self-replicating objects, a class of threats dubbed "grey goo," which slowed down servers over the weekend. On Sunday afternoon, the company took down the virtual world to clean its database of every instance of the digital viruses. The object manifested themselves in-world as golden rings--a nod to the objects collected by Sonic the Hedgehodge in Sega's popular video games, according to several posts on the Second Life forums. The massive attack marked the third time since September that the world created by San Francisco-based Linden Lab got overrun by quickly reproducing digital objects. The term "grey goo" comes from a hypothetical threat of nanotechnology: A self-replicating nanobot could consume the Earth's resources, transforming the world into a giant blob of grey goo. Some biotechnologists have warned about tailored viruses that could have a similar, but limited, effect. Maybe it's time to create a virtual Anti-malware product inside Second Life... BTW here's a video, showing the symptoms of the "Grey Goo" ring attack on the Second Life online multiplayer game last weekend. Let's hope my Second Life (-form) will be safe in the future.

Wiki, Wiki: I'm back from vacation!

Hackers are trying to use the good reputation of Wikipedia to lure unsuspecting users into executing malware. The very openness of Wiki that allows users to freely add or edit available content has made it an attractive target for virus authors to plant malicious code in articles. A POC worm targeting Wikiwas discovered earlier in August of this year. In a recent incident, an email was mass spammed to German computer users requesting them to download a security fix for a new variant of the infamous Blaster worm. The email was crafted to supposedly appear from Wikipedia, complete with an official Wikipedia logo. The email directed users to a fixed Wikipedia article which included a link to malware hosted on an external site. Editors at Wikipedia were quick to fix the misleading content in the article. However since Wiki stores all previous revisions to an article, the attacker was able to direct users to the archived pages via the spammed email. Wikipedia administrators had to finally erase all old versions of the article to resolve the issue. As malware authors continue to improve social engineering techniques, public community sites like MySpace, Orkut, Wikipedia et al will have to adapt and modify their policies with regards to posting and editing content. One can take a cue from webmail providers like Hotmail and Yahoo that have implemented mandatory virus scanning of attachments, to have all content scanned by an antivirus before being posted. This will help prevent mischief makers from creating toxic pages. Concerning the Wikipedia case I' don't like it. Personally I hate Wikipedia as the content is not always accurate and definitely not academic based, it's interesting to get some information from it but don't trust it completely as a lot of you will do. And you see now what you can get...