TechBulletin

Anti-virus companies are advising that everyone scan their machines before February 3, when the destructive virus known as Nyxem will delete a multitude of filetypes.

The virus is also known as Blackmal, MyWife, Kama Sutra, Grew and CME-24.

The mass mailing malware tries to entice users through social engineering efforts into opening an attached file promising pornographic material in an e-mail message. If the recipient opens the file, the malware sends itself to all the contacts that are contained in the system’s address book. The malware may also spread over writeable network shares on systems that have blank administrator passwords.

The virus will wait till the 3rd of each month to wreak its havoc.

February 3, 2006 is the first time this malware is expected to permanently corrupt the content of specific document format files. The malware also modifies or deletes files and registry keys associated with certain computer security-related applications. This prevents these applications from running when Windows starts.

Files of the following types will be deleted: DMP, DOC, XLS, MDB, MDE, PDF, PPS, PPT, PSD, RAR and ZIP.

Please update your Anti-virus definitions and scan your system before February 3, 2006.

Microsoft is considering the opportunity to create its own portable player, which could compete with the popular Apple iPod player. I’d remind you that iPod occupies the lion’s share of the market, to which the players with Microsoft software are aimed.

According to the spokesman of Microsoft there is no official solution on this matter so far. However he confirmed that the company is considering the idea to produce the player along with many other projects as the part of reorganizing program for 2006.

Source : techweb

The Los Angeles attorney’s office has sued the makers of “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” for allegedly hiding pornographic material inside the video game, officials said.

Rocky Delgadillo said his office sued Rockstar Games and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, for making misleading statements in marketing the game and engaging in unfair competition.

A telephone call made after business hours to a Take-Two spokesman in New York was not returned.

The game, released in October 2004, features characters that commit crimes such as murder, drug dealing and pimping.

Yahoo and Linksys joined forces on Thursday, allowing Yahoo Music subscribers to tune-in to tracks stored on their PC and access the audio output via a home stereo system.

The two companies collaborated to create a plug-in that lets the Linksys WMB54G Wireless-G Music Bridge work directly with the Yahoo Music Engine to enable users to stream music to different devices in the home.

Did Firefox 1.5 Rock you? I’m sure that most of are gonna give a blatant no to this, and though I’m a humongous firefox fan, I have to agree with you. Firefox 1.5 was not the revolutionary product, the browser which changed our world with it’s Version 1.0. But now Mozilla aims to change all that, yes as expected, development plans for 2.0 have already started and the mozilla developers have given us a sneak peek of what’s coming up.

Firefox developers aim to finish version 2.0 by mid 2006 and finish the changes by Q1. Firefox 2.0 will contain the same Gecko engine as the previous browsers, but some API’s might be added.

“From a development point of view, the idea of Firefox 2 is to deliver significant user experience enhancements on top of a relatively stable rendering engine as significant retooling is done on the main development trunk for what will become Firefox 3, and deliver them in a timely fashion.”

, is the comment from the official source.

Sex sells and the new internet worm (Nyxem-E) nick-named the “Kama Sutra worm” because it spreads under the guise of pornographic content, has leap-frogged lesser viruses reaching top-spot on world virus charts.

Nyxem-E aka Kama Sutra is a mass-mailing worm which attempts to disable security-related and file-sharing software and destroys files of certain types. When run on a Windows PC, the worm copies itself to shared network locations, and sends itself to e-mail addresses found on the target computer. Nyxem-E, according to F-Secure, is programmed to disable anti-virus and firewall software, and delete certain files including Office documents, on the third day of every month.

The Kama Sutra worm arrives as an e-mail attachment, with different subject lines including “School girl fantasies gone bad,” “The Best Videoclip Ever,” “A Great Video,” “give me a kiss,” “Fwd: Photo,” “Fw: Sexy,” “You Must View This Videoclip!” “Miss Lebanon 2006,” etc. The text differs; it may include references to the Kama Sutra - the ancient Sanskrit book on sex and related matters.

F-Secure has reported a steady stream of Nyxem worms from all over the world, and has said that at last call the worm showed 510,000 infected systems.

Recently even i have been receiving a lot of such mails from various yahoo groups

Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta 2 Build 5299 has leaked on the Internet. Activewin has also posted 50 high-res screenshots of the build, probably after finding it available for download at tech enthusiast site JCXP.net .

The build weighs in at 11.2 MB and can only be installed on Windows XP.

Screenshots: Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta 2 Preview (Build 5299)

Source: ActiveWin

Here’s an interesting read. Looks like Microsoft’s Sleeping with the Enemy !

“An investigative report into the Linux lab at Microsoft has revealed some interesting twists to Microsoft’s often stormy relation ship with the world of Open Source Software (OSS).

The lab, which opened last September, is run by Bill Hilf, a former programmer for IBM. Originally, it was set up to “help Microsoft understand the phenomenon of open source software and improve our products because of that.” But over time, the role of the lab has changed, from merely wanting to understand the “enemy” towards a tentative effort to working with them.”
Link: Microsoft’s Linux lab works on Open-Source interoperability

A design flaw in Internet Explorer could give malicious hackers an easy way to use Google Desktop to hijack user information.

Matan Gillon, a hacker from Israel, discovered the vulnerability in the cross-domain protections in IE and published a proof-of-concept exploit to show how Google Desktop can be cracked.

The infamous and controversial domain Sex.com has officially been sold to Boston-based Escom LLC for a reported $14 million, XBiz has learned.

Sex.com owner Gary Kremen was unavailable for comment, but a source from Kremen’s company, Grant Media, told XBiz that sales for the famous domain name will still be handled through Grant Media’s San Francisco offices.

Windows Vienna is the new codename for Windows Blackcomb the successor to Windows Vista. It’s true.

Microsoft has not talked much about Blackcomb but Microsoft’s blogging guru, Robert Scoble, has confirmed it in a thread reply.

While Windows Vista is intended to be a technologies-based release, Vienna is targeted directly at revolutionizing the way we interact with our home and office PCs.

We may see a whole new interface for Windows Vienna. The interface may involve some ideas based upon truely 3D Windows and an intergration of what is now known as Sidebar.

The Explorer shell is expected to be replaced in its entirety, with features such as the taskbar being replaced by a new concept based on the last 10 years of research from Microsoft’s “Vibe” lab. Projects such as GroupBar and LayoutBar are expected to make an appearance, allowing users to more effectively manage and keep track of their applications and documents while in use, and a new way of launching applications is expected - among other ideas, Microsoft is investigating a pie menu-type circular interface, similar in function to Apple’s dock feature.

Let’s wait and see…

A Child Online Protection Act was passed in the United states back in 1998.This act was created to protect children from harmful sexual material on the Internet. The act required adults to enter access codes
to view pornographic material online. The lower courts had blocked the law due to some reason and had since then never taken effect.

The Justice Department issued a subpoena to Google last year. This subpoena requested that Google hand over a broad range of material from its database, which included one million random web address, and all Google searches from any one week period related to pornographic material.The Bush administration claims that it needs this vast amount of information to determine how often pornographic material shows up in web searches, in the administrations attempt to revive the Child Online Protection Act.

Google refused to comply with the administrations request, stating that the release of such information would violate the privacy rights of it’s users and reveal company trade secrets. The U.S. government has indicated that other unspecified search engines have already agreed to release the requested information.

I believe the unspecified search engines are Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. Now, the Justice Department sued Google for not releasing documents that might help them track sexually explicit material on the Web.

Looks like everyone is out to get a piece of Google, for one reason or another.

Internet Explorer 7 will have a thorough flush feature that clears its history and all associated files stored after a Web site is accessed. In IE 6, a user has to spend lots of time trying to clear all the information stored after a Web site has been visited.

The new “delete browsing history” feature under the “tools” menu will be able to wipe out five major data categories, including temporary Internet files, cookies, history, form data, and passwords. A user can delete all of those at once or can individually choose which ones to wipe through the “delete browsing history” panel.

What is Spam?

Spam is the commonly used term for unsolicited commercial e-mail send in bulk. The most common form of spam is e-mail spam. The main difference between spam and solicited mail, or newsletter, is that you never signed up to receive it anywhere. Other forms of spam are instant messaging (IM) spam, search engine spam, blog spam and mobile phone messaging spam.

What does spam do?

Spam fills your inbox with useless e-mails preventing you from receiving important mails. A large percentage of spam contains ads for pornographic Web sites or other such places that can be unacceptable viewing for many, especially children.

Opening a spam mail could immediately infect your pc with spyware or a worm without your knowledge. Another problem these days are spambots, which are a major producer of e-mail spam. Some spammers create various e-mail viruses that transforms an unprotected PC into a spambot that will inform the spammer of its existence, and the spammer will command it to send a low volume of spam. This allows spammers to send high volumes of spam without being caught by their ISPs or being tracked down by anti-spammers as the low volume makes it hard to detect.

Microsoft had originally announced that Windows XP SP3 would be released before the launch of Windows Vista. They have now pushed back the scheduled release date of SP3 to the second half of 2007.

Most people believe that Microsoft will use the delay of Windows XP SP3 to further the cause of upgrading to Vista later on this year.

Acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting made Adwords on Radio possible for Google today. According to the press release by Google…Google has agreed to acquire dMarc Broadcasting, Inc., a Newport Beach, Calif.-based digital solutions provider for the radio broadcast industry.

In the future, Google plans to integrate dMarc technology into the Google AdWords platform, creating a new radio ad distribution channel
for Google advertisers.

Press release can be found here

Find out who is reading your email…

With all of the controversy about the news that the NSA has been monitoring, since 9/11, telephone calls and email messages of Americans, some folks might now be wondering if they are being snooped on. Here’s a quick and easy method to see if one’s email messages are being read by someone else.

The steps are:

1. Set up a Hotmail account.
2. Set up a second email account with a non-U.S. provider. (eg. Rediffmail.com)
3. Send messages between the two accounts which might be interesting to the NSA.
4. In each message, include a unique URL to a Web server that you have access to its server logs. This URL should only be known by you and not linked to from any other Web page. The text of the message should encourage an NSA monitor to visit the URL.
5. If the server log file ever shows this URL being accessed, then you know that you are being snooped on. The IP address of the access can also provide clues about who is doing the snooping.

I have mentioned here a few mistakes that are commonly made by web designers:

1. Frames: A few years ago, frames were the in thing. They allowed one or two parts of your site stay constant while only one frame changed.As a result people used to use them for fast loading of pages.

   But with the growing popularity of search engines, it became a known fact that Framed sites were not being properly indexed.

   When a search bot visits a site with frames it indexes only the main frame ignoring all the other frames, leading to sites with frames dropping rapidly in search engine rankings. This is one of the reasons why frames are no longer popular.

   Another reason is that bookmarking a site with frames is not easy.

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Many people are not aware of the Windows Registry and why it is important to regularly clean it.

The Registry is Windows internal database which records an entry for every software you install and use. It even stores information of each user’s profile and hardware devices which is continuously reffered to by Windows.

If you are like me you will have a lot of unwanted entries in your registry by regularly installing and uninstalling different applications, which will affect the functioning of your PC.

There are many softwares that help you to keep your registry clean by removing these unwanted entries.

RegCleaner 4.3 is one such software that helps you with the task of cleaning your registry. You can download it from here.

A remote code execution security issue has been identified in the Graphics Rendering Engine that could allow an attacker to remotely compromise your Windows-based system and gain control over it.

Download: Vista Beta 1 | x64

Download: Vista December CTP | x64