Soft and Music

Over the weekend, I got an e-mail from my Mom warning me not to open any e-mail with the title "Obama Acceptance Speech" because it contained a trojan. It even cited Snopes as stating that the threat wasn't a hoax. I sent her a reply referencing the last post on spam I did, which had a paragraph about Obama spam on it. My point was anyone who thinks there is only one e-mail of this type is out there is probably sadly mistaken. On Sunday, with the inauguration less than 24 hours away, I got a hot tip that the Symantec Lab had detected another round of Obama spam with malicious intent being sent across the electronic universe. Zuftikar Ramzan announced on the Symantec Security Blog that this latest round of Obama spam uses lures with titles like "Our new president has gone," "Obama refused to be the president of the United States of America," and "There is no president in the USA anymore and Obama has gone." Zuftikar also mentioned a link in these e-mails (removed for safety reasons) leading to a faux website that looks amazingly similar to the official Obama-Biden site. The fake site can be seen below. This fake site attempts to exploit weaknesses in a Web browser to install malicious software without the owner's knowledge. According to Zuftikar, the page and its links all have malicious software on them. In other words, the entire site is literally a virtual booby trap. The files are titled usa.exe, obamanew.exe, pdf.exe, statement.exe, barackblog.exe and barackspeech.exe. While the titles might be different, they lead to the same variety of malware known as the W32.Waledac. This malicious software is capable of stealing sensitive information, turning your machine into a spam-spewing zombie and leaving a back door for a hacker to gain access to it. Political themes have been used a lot in recent times to lure people into clicking on links in spam e-mails they shouldn't have. Other common lures include the old fashioned too-good-to-be-true, security and badge-of-authority types (IRS, FBI, CIA, etc.). With tax season upon us, expect the IRS to be a common one used in the near future. Symantec does provide removal instructions for this malware on their site, but most of us are far better off by not clicking on this type of stuff in the first place. These e-mails are sent out by the millions and the best thing to do is hit delete before opening them up.

My girlfriend's PC is an amalgamation of old and new parts. The ten-year-old motherboard went south and needed replaced, but the IDE hard drives were still in good shape. Seeking to merge the old with the new, it was upgraded from a 750MHz AMD Duron processor on a decade-old Gigabyte motherboard (hot when AGP first debuted) to one of the newer Intel Core 2 Duos with a Gigabyte S-Series motherboard. IDE is on the way out, replaced by Serial ATA, so I had to look specifically for that in whatever motherboard I was going to buy. We put the thing together, fired it up, installed Windows XP Pro, got everything else on there, and she started happily plugging away on the upgraded monster (slipped a Geforce 7950GT in there to replace the 3dfx Voodoo3 too, to feed her growing gaming habit). Everything seemed ready to cook. As an avid online-TV watcher, it wasn't long before she discovered the sound and video in the stuff she was watching would stutter often, though it seemed to smooth out as things played on. I initially chocked it up to buffering issues, but when it started happening in offline videos and music in Windows Media Player and iTunes, I knew something was amiss. We tried updating sound hardware drivers, but that didn't help. Then we defragmented the hard drive, but to no avail. I even replaced the IDE cable, but nothing changed. I had narrowed it down to only happening when the C drive was being accessed, though. She tested it by playing a video file, then in the middle of it, she initiated a file copy from her laptop through the LAN to the afflicted machine's C drive and sure enough, as soon as the HDD activity LED lit up, the sound started getting choppy. Even Windows start up and shut down sound events were affected. After a few minutes of tireless searching (hey, I'm good), we stumbled onto a couple very specific fixes other users fighting this problem had reported. The first was to see if Windows had reverted the Transfer Mode between the hard drive and motherboard from the more common and faster DMA back to the slower but more reliable PIO. Windows switches automatically to PIO after a number of disk errors are reported, as it's apparently a more stable reading method. Problem is, since it is slower, it can cause glitches like what we were experiencing, and it's particular to IDE drives, so I wouldn't have seen this before on our other machines, which use SATA exclusively. To check for this, go to Settings-> Control Panel-> System-> Device Manager-> IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers-> Primary IDE Channel-> Advanced Settings. Look under Device 0 and it should be set to "DMA if available." If it says "PIO only" instead, change it, click OK, save settings, and reboot. This may resolve your issue, though if the disk is really going bad, Windows is likely to change it back to PIO after some time, and you may want to look into getting a new hard drive.

Looking for a new form of poker to start playing? Interested in playing one of the few forms of poker where you play merely against luck, not the house or other players? Interested in prepping for Vegas, but without any large risk? If so, then the new game from Avalinx is the perfect game for you. Let‘Em Ride PRO is yet another quality release in Avalinx’s PRO series of iPhone Games. Play against Lady Luck as you attempt to earn as many pixelated chips as you can. With controls over every single aspect of the game, from the looks of the cards to the style of the shuffling, you can get this game to be exactly what you want. Let’Em Ride PRO can do all of this, and more, for only $4.99. Let’Em Ride PRO has several nice features that make it well worth your money. The interface of the application — with its smooth renderings, vibrant colors, and changeable looks — makes this game ideal for everybody. Additionally, the overall layout looks exceptionally clean and is well planned. You can navigate and play without any problems using your fingers, even if they are as huge as mine. All of the options are also exceptionally easy to find. Similar to all other games in the PRO series, Let’Em Ride PRO feels as polished and perfected as something Apple would put out for the iPhone. My favorite part of Let’Em Ride PRO is the actual game play. While the interface is nice, this part easily steals the attention. From betting, to riding/bringing down your bet, the game play is well done. It actually feels almost natural (save for the fact that you are holding a three inch long rectangle), and it does emulate the actual dealing style quite well. Plus, if you don’t quite know what to do, the PRO series offers an ‘ask the dealer’ option, which should help you out in those tricky situations. The graphics, which can normally distract from an otherwise great game, are of no concern here as they are flawless and vibrant. Another good part of Let’Em Ride PRO, and all of the PRO series, are the extras. By clicking on ‘Master the Game’ in the main menu, you can then learn quite a lot about the real Let Them Ride poker game. There is the ‘Rules and Terminology’ section, which is great for new players or people used to playing with other gambling platforms. The ‘Strategy’ section, which teaches you when to Ride, and when to Bring Down, helps you prepare for your trip to the local Indian Casino. Lastly, there is the ‘Payouts’ section, which, very simply, tells you the payouts. All of these sections are a nice addition to the game.

With the shutdown of McColo by Internet Service Providers in November, global spam volumes dropped over 50 percent. Sadly, this appears to have been a short-term fix. According to a new Symantec report, the spammers have moved to new locations and the volumes are back up to 80 percent of pre-McColo levels. While spam originates from a lot of places, the United States is still in the number one spot, with 27 percent of the spam observed originating from there. China and Brazil tied for second place with 7 percent of spam originating from these countries. The report indicates that URLs in Canadian Pharmacy spam messages were noted as being top-level Chinese domains (.cn TLD). Could this mean that Chinese knock-off (counterfeit) prescriptions are trying to make it appear as if they are coming from Canada? Given the recent concerns of tainted and poisonous merchandise being exported from China, this might be a concern. Of course, I would think that buying prescription meds over the Internet should be a concern to most people, anyway. In another variation of recently observed spam, a user is invited to join a social networking site. The link goes to a real group, which was created on the social networking site by the spammer. The group then links to a free blogging site, which redirects the victim to the ultimate destination URL. At the destination URL, personal information is requested, which is probably used to sell to marketing companies or used in other spam campaigns. Please note, although not mentioned in the report, that some of these campaigns might have malicious intent or be scams. Also noted during the holiday season was a lot of e-Card spam. This spam sometimes comes with malware (malicious software) designed to steal personal and financial information or turn your machine in to a spam spewing zombie computer using your credentials.

The Phishermen (and probably a few women) are always looking for fresh waters to hook some unsuspecting phish — so it should be no surprise that Twitter is their latest target. After all, e-mail, cell phones, and Facebook have already been phished, along with countless desktops and laptops. According to a Symantec blog post, Twitter users are receiving warning messages from Twitter command and control about this matter. The blog post by Marian Meritt, the Internet Safety Guru at Symantec, gives blogger Chris Pirillo credit for breaking the story on Saturday. According to the blog post at Symantec, the messages appear to come from someone you know at Twitter with a link to a malicious website designed to steal information. Twitter also put up a warning on their blog. It starts with a Wikipedia definition of phishing and then details how the phishing attack will come in the form of an e-mail message notifying a person they have a Twitter Direct Message. Thus far, the social engineering lures being used in the e-mail go something like this: "Hey! check out this funny blog about you…" and direct the user to click on a link to a fake website. They also point out that if you look at the URL you'll see that it is not the same as the URL for the normal landing page for Twitter. A trick to do this (without clicking on the link) is to hover your mouse pointer over the link. If you look at the bottom left portion of your page it will display the URL the link goes to. With all the malware people can get nowadays by just visiting (driving-by) a malicious page — this is a much safer way to go about it rather instead of actually clicking on the link to find out. Twitter blog picture showing where to look for a suspicious URL Authentic looking phishing sites aren't hard to create. Often the hacker merely copies the pictures of a legitimate site and puts them on a compromised (hacked) site so the activity can't be traced back to them. Hackers frequently seek out sites with poor security to compromise and put up their own (malicious) site. Also contained in the blog entry are instructions on what to do if you've been phished. Basically, they direct you to their password reset tool and a legitimate e-mail will be sent to you so you can change your password. Interestingly enough, Twitter also reported this morning that 33 prominent Twitter-ers were hacked over the weekend. Apparently, the notables included President-elect Obama, Rick Sanchez, and Britney Spears. According to Twitter, this attack has nothing to do with the phishing expedition into their waters. Apparently, someone hacked into some of the tools their support team uses to help people with their e-mail. They also pointed out that Mr. Obama hasn't been twittering lately due to issues with the transition.