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Beware: Malware Will Delete All Your MP3 Collection!

Hackers who created this malware must have been very nasty else why would someone spend nights in order to create a malware which goes on to delete the computers mp3 files. Yes that is true!

A recent article on computerworld suggests that the creators of this malware are more likely to be teenage mischief-makers than the organized criminal gangs we typically see authoring financially motivated malware these days.

Symantec Corp., which calls the worm W32.Deletemusic, said in an advisory that the worm copies itself to all drives on a PC. It also creates an autorun file to start itself whenever a user accesses a drive.

The worm affects PCs running Windows 2000, 95, 98, Me, NT, Server 2003, XP and Vista, Symantec said. To block potential problems users could disable the autorun feature in Windows that automatically launches programs on CDs or USB drives.

Users could also exercise caution by holding down the SHIFT for a few seconds in order to deactivate the Autorun function when they plug in USB sticks or other removable media to their computers or when they insert a disk. Users should also make regular backups for their critical data by burning DVDs or using automated backup tools.

More:
Making of MP3
Must Read Hacking Tips To Be Safe
Use Google Video To Hack Password
YouTube Could Be Used To Hack Computer

Technorati Tags: Deletemp3, malware, worm

Labels: bugs found, security

Stolen Credit Card's Money Being Used For Good Cause

Labels: security

Comparison Of The Best Anti Viruses Available

Labels: security, tips tricks and hacks

20 Must Have Firefox Extensions

Google Browser Sync & Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
If you use Firefox on more than one computer, you might be frustrated keeping track of what bookmarks are where. Google Browser Sync to the rescue. Using your existing Google account, Google Browser Sync will sync not only bookmarks, but sessions, persistent cookies, passwords and history among instances of Firefox on different machines. (This is user configurable on a broad scale -- i.e., you can choose to sync cookies, or not to sync cookies, but you can't make the decision based on individual cookies.) In addition to your Google account name and password, you'll assign a PIN to add additional security to the transaction.

Version reviewed: 1.3.20061031.0
www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync

One downside is that the initial sync can take quite a while, and for some folks, Google Browser Sync might be overkill. If all you want to do is sync bookmarks, try Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer. You'll have to set up an account with Foxmarks (the same is true of Google, but many of us already have Google accounts), but the initial sync seems much faster.

As a bonus, you can access your bookmarks by navigating to my.foxmarks.com. This could be handy if you're on a borrowed machine somewhere.

Version reviewed: 0.84
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2410

Session Manager
Session Manager is a handy utility to help you manage your Firefox tabs. If you're a Web surfer who habitually visits the same sites every morning, all you need do is open the sites in separate tabs and/or windows, and then use Session Manager to save the session under a name of your choosing. After that, every morning start up Firefox and go to Tools > Session Manager, pick your session and voila, all the windows and tabs open up just as you saved them.

You can also choose a saved session as your "Start Session" (instead of just using a start page) that'll open each time you launch Firefox. As an added bonus, Session Manager tracks your sessions as you surf, and if Firefox (or your system) crashes, you can recover the selection of tabs you had open when it crashed.

One last perk: If you accidentally close a tab, you can easily reopen it from the Session Manager menu.

While Firefox 2.0 has incorporated many of Session Manager's functions, I find Session Manager performs its tasks more elegantly and reliably. And if you're still on Firefox 1.5, Session Manager remains your lone option for these features. Note that the most current version of Session Manager requires Firefox 2.0 or later. Earlier, Firefox 1.5-compatible versions can be found on the Web site.

Version reviewed: 0.5.3.1
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2324

All-in-One Gestures
This is one of those extensions that does more than you'll probably ever need, but the core function is to assign commands to "Gestures" made with the mouse. For instance, holding down the right mouse button and dragging the mouse a bit to the left issues a "Back" command. A right-mouse button/dragging up combo opens a new tab. And so on.

The extension also provides auto-scrolling, as seen in Internet Explorer. This is where you click the middle button, then move the mouse up or down to start the page continuously scrolling. The farther you move the mouse, the faster the page scrolls.

All-in-One offers a wide selection of small navigation improvements like these. It's really one of those "you have to try it to appreciate it" extensions. But the core functionality of accomplishing frequent tasks via a small twitch of the mouse makes this a must-have for its many advocates.

Version reviewed: 0.18.0
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/12

IE Tab
It's a fact of life that there are still Web sites out there that require (or work better with) Internet Explorer. IE Tab to the rescue. Once installed, it places a small icon in your status bar. Clicking this icon swaps out the rendering engine from Firefox's to Internet Explorer's. In my experience, this is particularly helpful with sites that refuse to play video in Firefox.

You can set filters so that certain sites are always displayed in an IE tab. In fact, the extension comes preconfigured with filters for the Microsoft Update site. It also adds an "Open Link in IE Tab" option to the right-click context menu of Firefox.

Since the extension uses IE's engine, this one is for Windows only.

Version reviewed: 1.3.1.20070126
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1419

Download Statusbar
You're probably familiar with that sometimes-pesky Downloads window that pops up whenever you download a file in Firefox. Download Statusbar suppresses that window from popping up, and instead provides you the same information in the status bar at the bottom of the browser window. (You can still manually open the Downloads window if you find you need it.)

You can roll your mouse over the file name and get a pop-up tool tip with some extra information about your download, too (where it's being download from, and where it's being saved to, the speed of the download, percentage complete and so on).

Additional feature, still in beta, is to automatically run your virus scanner against downloaded files.

Pretty simple, but it helps to "clean up" the browsing experience. By the way, this is from the same developer as Download Sort, below.

Version reviewed: 0.9.4.5.1
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/26

Download Sort
If you find yourself doing a lot of "Save Link As" or "Save Image As" downloading, then Download Sort will be quite a time saver. It allows you to file downloads by extension, or by a keyword or regular expression in the URL.

Here's how it works. After installing the extension, you set up filters. As an example, you might want any file with the extension .jpg to go into a Pictures folder and anything ending in .zip to go into an Archives folder on your drive.

Now when you right-click on a .jpg image and choose Save Image As, the image immediately downloads into your Pictures folder without any prompting. Right-click on a link to a .zip file and choose Save Link As, and again, the file goes right into your Archives folder. You can optionally have the extension create subdirectories according to date, domain and a few other criteria.

The big drawback here is that Download Sort doesn't intercept normal left-click downloads. It'd be great to see the developer add this capability.

Version reviewed: 2.5.7
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/25

Nuke Anything Enhanced
If you find yourself printing a lot of Web pages, this extension will help you save on ink. Once installed, it adds a "Remove this object" option to the right-click context menu. Place your mouse over information you don't need printed (menu bars, big graphical logos and so on) and use "Remove this object" to zap them temporarily. Clean up the page, then print just what you need.

It can be a little fussy, since you don't know exactly what you're hovering over. Images are pretty straightforward, but menus and other page parts can take some trial and error. There's an "Undo Last Remove" option in case you accidentally zap something you need. Or you can just reload the page to restore it to its original state.

One limitation is that you can't easily nuke Flash content, since when you right-click on Flash, you get its context menu, not Firefox's. Sometimes you can find the container tag that holds the Flash, but it can take some trial and error.

Version reviewed: 0.54
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/951

Forecastfox
Forecastfox puts an up-to-date weather forecast in Firefox's status bar. Just click one of its icons to see the full weather report at AccuWeather.com.

A wide range of options gives you control over how much, or how little, information you want, including a radar image button, severe weather warnings and extended forecasts of up to eight days. You can set up profiles, each with its own set of options. Use these to get the weather in different zip codes if you're a traveler, or create profiles with lots of data for turbulent winter conditions and minimal data for warm, sunny summer days.

The only downside here is that, as with all extensions that rely on data from external Web sites, if the AccuWeather.com site isn't responding, you won't get any weather updates.

Version reviewed: 0.9.3.1
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/398

Answers
This one's simple: Just hold down the Alt key (Option key on a Mac) and click on a word, and a window will pop up with information about that word from Answers.com. (You can have the results displayed in a full window if you'd rather.) There's a More button in the pop-up that'll open a new tab with the full Answers.com results page.

For phrases, you still have to highlight, right-click and choose "Look up on Answers.com" to get results in a new tab.

Version reviewed: 2.2.22
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/735

FireFTP
Why bounce between applications when you can use FireFTP and have a full-featured FTP client in one tab, and the page you're working on in another?

FireFTP adds an option to Firefox's Tools menu. Click on it and a new tab opens (you can set this to a new window if you prefer) with a traditional two-panel FTP client: local files on the left, remote on the right. By right-clicking on files you can tweak their permissions and all the other things you'd expect to be able to do via FTP.

One nice feature is "View on the Web," which opens the file on the remote server in a new tab. You can set up each host to "snip" out parts of the directory structure (/public_html, for example) so that you get valid URLs rather than the full "physical" path to the file.

The one disappointment is that the client is FTP only. When asked about SFTP support, the author responds (in a FAQ on his page), "Maybe in Version 2.0." Let's hope.

Warning: The combination of FireFTP and Firefox 2.0.0.1 exposes a regression bug in Firefox, causing high CPU usage. If you're still running 2.0.0.1, you should upgrade to 2.0.0.2 before installing FireFTP.

Version reviewed: 0.94.6
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/684

Firebug
Firebug is an essential tool for developers working on Web pages. It allows you to examine and tweak the HTML, CSS and JavaScript contained in a page, all on the fly. Firebug opens either as a panel at the bottom of the page you're inspecting, or in a separate window.

Exploring all that Firebug can do could be a full article of its own. But for a taste of its power, let's look at basic HTML coding. Once Firebug is activated, running your mouse over an HTML tag in the Firebug window causes a highlighted area to appear on the rendered page, showing where that tag is in the display.

For JavaScript development, Firebug finds errors and quickly jumps to where they are in the code. You can change the code and step through a script line by line, set breakpoints and so on. Essentially, it's a full-fledged JavaScript debugging system residing in a browser extension.

Firebug is a great extension and a big topic. If you develop Web pages, you'll want to add this extension to your tool kit. There's plenty of documentation and discussion of what it can do at the GetFirebug Web site.

Version reviewed: 1.01
www.getfirebug.com

Web Developer
Web Developer is another virtual Swiss Army Knife for coding. There's some overlap with Firebug, but where Firebug concerns itself almost exclusively with the content of a Web page, Web Developer offers tools to tweak how you're interacting with the page.

For instance, you can modify cookies on the fly, examining, deleting and even manually adding them. You can tweak form settings, clear private data and disable the cache -- all kinds of real-time manipulations.

Web Developer's features can be accessed as a tool bar, or as cascading menus under Firefox's Tools menu. The tool bar is particularly handy since you can see all 12 of the top-level categories of features at a glance (and, of course, it can be easily turned off when you're not in the midst of site development).

This extension can even be useful for regular Web users, thanks to features like the ability to turn off background images. If you've ever struggled to read text displayed, for example, over a background image of someone's dog, you'll appreciate this.

Web developers will probably want to run both Firebug and Web Developer, and the two extensions seem to co-exist peacefully.

Version reviewed: 1.1.3
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60

MeasureIt
So simple and so useful. After installing this extension, you'll have a small ruler icon in your status bar. When you click on this icon, the client area of your browser window will fade out a little, and you'll have a crosshair cursor.

Use this to drag out a box over a section of the screen. Next to the box is its height and width, measured in pixels. No more guessing as to how wide a sidebar really is, or if the footer is really rendering 150 pixels deep like your style sheet says it should. When you're done, a tap of the Escape key turns off MeasureIt and gives your Web page back to you.

ColorZilla
Another quick and simple tool, this one more for designers than developers. ColorZilla puts an eyedropper icon in your status bar. Click it and you'll get a crosshair cursor. As you run this over a Web page, the RGB values of the pixel under the crosshair will display in the status bar, both as three separate values and as a hex value (e.g., R:255, G:255, B:255 | #FFFFFF).

Additionally, you'll get a border around the style container you're hovering over, an indicator of what the container is and what style it is using (e.g., h2.posttitle or div#content).

ColorZilla also offers a color picker, color palettes and easy access to DOM Inspector, a Mozilla tool for examining a page's Document Object Module.

Huh!!!

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Labels: firefox, firefox tips, fun, google, ie, security, yahoo, youtube

Linux Kernel IPv6 Sockets DoS Vulnerability

A kernel vulnerability has been found today by Masayuki Nakagawa, which can be exploited by local attackers to cause a denial of service (DoS) attack.

Labels: bugs found, linux, security, tips tricks and hacks

Pirate Our Software: Microsoft

I have been one of those believers who think that piracy supports the particular company whose product is being pirated and here I have a Microsoft official supporting me.

At the Morgan Stanley Technology conference last week in San Francisco, Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes commented on the benefits of software counterfeiting. "If they're going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else," he said. "We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products. What you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software."

Think of a user who uses a Microsoft software continuously for many years. Now in long run when Microsoft succeeds in creating a "non crackable software" (huh!) then you will be forced to pay for that software because of your addiction to Microsoft's products.

Other reason which might be the point why Jeff made such a comment was that any human could go on to pay Microsoft for the product which he used for years as pirated version as he may have the idea that the company is worth that money. After all the MS products are very user friendly and are easily able to create there user base.

One biggest reason which I see a profitable point of MS wanting people to use pirated OS (windows ofcourse) is that they will succeed in keeping the people away from LINUX! Later they will care about converting them to legitimate users.

This could be a good thought as this would somehow bring few pirates to bay.

Related:
Scary IE and FireFox Vulnerability
Vista May Choke Internet?
Vulnerability In MS Office Could Give Access To Your Computer

Labels: announcements, microsoft, security

HOW TO PayPal Security Key

[Click here to see the Original Video]

Labels: security, tips tricks and hacks, tutorial

Vulnerability In Versions 7.08 And Earlier Of Adobe Reader And Acrobat

A vulnerability has been reported in Adobe Reader. It is caused due to an unspecified error when processing pdf files.

Adobe Reader on Windows
Adobe strongly recommends upgrading to Adobe Reader 8, available from the following site:
http://www.adobe.com/go/getreader.

Users with Adobe Reader 7.0 through 7.0.8, who cannot upgrade to Reader 8, should upgrade to Reader 7.0.9. Adobe Reader 7.0.9 is available as a full installation package and not a patch. It can be installed on top of any older version of Reader 7 and user preferences will be preserved:
http://www.adobe.com/go/getreader.

If customers are using Adobe Reader 6.0–6.0.5 and are unable to upgrade to version 8 or 7.0.9 due to Operating System constraints for example, Adobe recommends upgrading to version 6.0.6 either via a series of patches from: http://www.adobe.com/downloads or by using the auto-update mechanism within the product when prompted.

Adobe Reader on Mac OS
Adobe strongly recommends upgrading to Adobe Reader 8, available from the following site: http://www.adobe.com/go/getreader.

Users with Adobe Reader 7.0 through 7.0.8, who cannot upgrade to Reader 8, should upgrade to Reader 7.0.9. The Reader 7.0.9 update requires that Adobe Reader 7.0.8 is installed on your Mac system. To determine which version of Adobe Reader is installed, choose Adobe Reader > About Adobe Reader. The version number appears in the upper left corner below the Adobe Reader logo.

If version 7.0.8 is installed, download and install this incremental patch.
After downloading the update file, double-click it to begin the update process and access the file's contents.

If version 7.0, 7.0.1, 7.0.2, 7.0.3, 7.0.5, 7.0.7 or an earlier version of Reader is installed and customers cannot update to Reader 8, Adobe recommends that customers download the full Adobe Reader 7.0.9 installer from the Reader download page.

Adobe Acrobat on Windows or Mac OS
For version 7.0–7.0.8, users should utilize the product's automatic update facility. The default installation configuration runs automatic updates on a regular schedule, and can be manually activated by choosing Help > Check For Updates Now. Alternatively, the update files can also be manually downloaded and installed from www.adobe.com/downloads.

If customers are using Adobe Acrobat 6.0–6.0.5 for Windows and are unable to upgrade to version 8 or 7.0.9 due to Operating System constraints for example, Adobe recommends upgrading to Windows version 6.0.6 either via a series of patches from: http://www.adobe.com/downloads or by using the auto-update mechanism within the product when prompted.

Adobe Reader on UNIX
For version 7.0, users should upgrade to Adobe Reader 7.0.9 from http://www.adobe.com/go/getreader.

For versions prior to 7.0, users should upgrade to 7.0.9 http://www.adobe.com/go/getreader.

Server-side workarounds for website operators
Adobe has provided workarounds for website operators to prevent the cross-site scripting vulnerability (CVE-2007-0045) from the server side. Please review Security Advisory APSA07-02 for more information.

Labels: adobe, bugs found, security, tips tricks and hacks

Vulnerability In MS Office Could Give Access To Your Computer

Microsoft and vulnerabilities have a relationship similar to a company boss and the subordinates. They hate each other but they cannot leave each other too. The fifth zero-day unpatched vulnerability has been confirmed by Microsoft.

Related Softwares:
Microsoft Office 2000, Microsoft Office XP, Microsoft Office 2003, and Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac are the softwares found vulnerable.

What can cause the vulnerability:
When a user opens a specially crafted Office file using a malformed string, it may corrupt system memory in such a way that an attacker could execute arbitrary code.

Labels: bugs found, microsoft, security, tips tricks and hacks

25th Birthday of Virus

First thought: "25 years? Aaaah I'm old!"

Fortunately I still regularly get the feeling I had back when I wrote cloner.

"Why did I do it", a reporter asked. "Was it malicious?"

No, not malicious. It was a practical joke combined with a hack. A wonderful hack.

Back then nothing was networked. We had these computers in a lab, and there was software for them on floppy disks. You stick in the disk and run the software. Simple.

The aha moment was when I realized I could essentially get my program to move around by itself. I could give it its own motive force, by having it hide in the resident RAM of the machine between floppy changes, and hitching a ride onto the next floppy that would be inserted. Whoa. That would be cool.

Insight without implementation is worthless, so to work I went.

 Elk Cloner:  The program with a personality

It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
 Yes it's Cloner!

It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too

 Send in the Cloner!

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Labels: announcements, bugs found, security

First pirated HD DVD movie hits BitTorrent

Pirates around the world have fired another shot with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB.

This release follows the announcement, less than a month ago, that the copy protection on HD DVD had been bypassed by an anonymous programmer known only as Muslix64. The open-source program to implement this was called Backup HDDVD and was released in a manner designed to put the onus of cracking on the user, not the software. To extract an unencrypted copy of the HD DVD source material required obtaining that disc's volume or title key separately, which the software did not do. However, a key was later released on the Internet, and a method for extracting further keys is allegedly available as well.

Now that the genie is out of the lamp, so to speak, what will the reaction be from the content industry? CyberLink, the makers of PowerDVD playback software, have already stated that the title keys were not obtained through their software, although this has yet to be conclusively proven. As for the content providers themselves, they have already said that they reserve the right to invalidate known pirated keys in the future. But to be of any use, they'll first need to determine which software application is responsible for giving up the volume keys. If it is something like PowerDVD, future titles can require that the user upgrade their software in order to play discs—this can be made to happen automatically when new discs are first inserted.

Muslix64 and others involved in Backup HDDVD are deliberately not exposing the actual method by which the keys have been obtained. This is partly to protect themselves from legal repercussions, but also to ensure that whatever "hole" that is being exploited remains unpatched. In the ongoing war between the pirates and the content providers, the pirates appear to be winning, but who knows who will get caught in the crossfire?

Source: arstechnica (the full news article copied)

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Labels: security, torrents

NSA to Secure Your Network

The National Security Agency/Central Security Service is America’s cryptologic organization. It coordinates, directs, and performs highly specialized activities to protect U.S. government information systems and produce foreign signals intelligence information. A high technology organization, NSA is on the frontiers of communications and data processing. It is also one of the most important centers of foreign language analysis and research within the government.

NSA is providing a network security guide which is about air-tight network security, urging you, for example, to enforce a password history of at least 24 different 12+ character passwords, swapping out passwords at least once every 90 days etc. The free PDF covers Windows and Unix security setups.

Download here [Pages: 48, Size: 818kb]

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Labels: security, tips tricks and hacks