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Spyware for Corporate Espionage
therufus writes "Late in July, an e-mail that hit employee in-boxes at a British credit card and finance company carried a secret payload--spyware capable of recording confidential corporate data and sending it over the Net."
Don't open Emails that you have no clue who they came from. This is just common sense.
Dubbed the Consortium Of Anti-Spyware Technology Vendors and led by the creators of the popular Ad-Aware and Pest Patrol software programs, the group is trying to create standard definitions of "spyware," "adware" and other pests, and give best-practices recommendations to the companies that want to avoid being blocked by their software.(emphasis added)
Once again, the main technical problem lies with Windows. Spyware is just another form of malware, which takes advantage of defects in the operating system to gain access.
I would hope that the Consortium Of Anti-Spyware Technology Vendors would promote Linux, Mac and other operating systems that are better equipped to rebuff malware attacks.
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I'm not. This is the logical conclusion (Or beginning) to the "virus age" that we've been experiencing. And I think the articale is wrong in some respects, like their thinking that the script kiddies and such are long gone. They are still here, and are having nore effect than ever as they modify already dangerous viruses, making it harder to block and stop them. And tell me, when has broad ranging legislation really helped anyone? Untill it's proven effective, I will remain wary of anything of the sort.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
What does UV light do to hard disks? Last time I looked, aluminium castings and pressed aluminium were pretty much UV-opaque. And, the oxide layers on the platters aren't UV sensitive either.
I second that, it would not be too hard to either write the key logger or the logic bomb - for that matter it would not nessecary need to destroy the entire program, just anything that can be used to track back to the oginator. The biggest problem in preventing something such would be to control the vectors through which it could be introduced to the network (i.e. Users running e-mail attactments), because once the program is on the network the damage has been done.
Don't open Emails that you have no clue who they came from. This is just common sense
Come one, grow up, we're no longer 6 years old and there is no good reason why we should be forced to live in fear of our emails !!
If a email can do all kinds of bad stuff to your computer, it is the fault of the one who wrote the email software, period..
Don't try to blame the victim because he was simply using the software for what is it supposed to do ...
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Yes, it's becoming vaguely "Star Wars"-ish. Darth Gator versus PepiMK Skywalker... oy, there's something I never wanted to see. However, at the school district where I work, we're coming up with an interesting method of combating spyware: lawsuits against the companies. Since the spyware is often found on elementary school computers, and it's children who download it, the technical staff has considered lawsuits. IANAL, but it goes something like this: the children are obviously minors, and when they click the EULA for installing an ActiveX control or someone goes through the ByteVerify exploit, they do not create a legally binding contract, and as it's an elementary school, the advertisers are very obviously collecting data on people under 13, which violates the COPA. Hence, we sue. It made sense to the legal department, and they're now trying to take out Rightfinder and CoolWebSearch. Also, since the CWS group of spyware can be classified as Trojan horses/virii, aren't they in violation of some obscure section of the USC? I'd _swear_ that they were.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
As a sysadmin that has been dealing with security issues in financial and other corporate settings for well over a decade, I can tell you that the fear-factor on kiddies with their viruses starts to fade over time. However, what I've noticed happening is that people are coming to accept these relatively benign viruses, root-kits, etc as a fact of life, and they seem to be forgetting that where kiddie-hack-of-the-week can succede there WILL ALWAYS BE a small, but worrisome number of clueful people exploiting the opening.
Most often those people are insiders, so you have the added worry that things like firewalls are useless (do you sniff email for viruses on internal mail? do you have unpatched servers that only intenal users have access to?), and they may be able to convince others that you think you can trust to look the other way.
Security is one of those ugly balancing acts. Ultimately, it's a losing game because once a determined cracker with a clue sets their sights on you, you're done for. No amount of security is sufficient... really (yes, even a gasketted vault with armed guards CAN be cracked). The key is risk-vs-reward and always trying to make sure that some poor clueless bastard out there is an easier target than you.
The only thing that's news here is that someone caught it. God knows how much information is redistributed / modified this way (there are at least a dozen similar methods I can think of personally that any self-respecting spy, corporate or otherwise, must be using). That this one was caught just shows that people that aren't professionals are getting into the game.
I have the pessimistic view that anything you know that someone else knows must be public knowledge (certainly to any member of the public that cares to know). The trick is, if you know they know, how do minimize the damage from the notions of a "secret" or "confidentiality" becoming extinct?
God forbid we do develop telepathy like some sci-fi prophesied evolutionary advance.
*Yawn* So what? Idiots will always open email attachments from unknown recipients and ultimately execute some sort of hidden code on their machine mainly because they can't figure out how to turn that stuff off or stop clicking on everything they see. I'd love to blame M$ here, but it really is the techno-weenies that do it to themselves by pretending they know how to use a computer, yet no matter how many times they're told "don't open attachments" they do it anyway. I love it when the email software is set up to autoexecute this stuff by default so they don't even know about it. RTFM, people!
-gam
"In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."
I think that China choose Linux not because of Windows source code but because Windows is the product of an American company.
But maybe I'm wrong.
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The advantage of completely wiping the key logger is that if you destroy the evidence that they've been hacked, they'll never raise their suspicions, and you're much more likely to get away with whatever you're going to use those passwords for.
Otherwise some administrator browses through someone's machine two months later, trying to figure out why it's so slow, and says "oh, shit..." - and then security clamps down like a {pick useful crude metaphor here}. It's far easier to slip in when noone's the wiser.
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
We have had network problems in the past. China has opted to bet the farm on Linux after seeing the Windows Source Code.
Even worse, maybe China never intended to use Windows but just wanted the source so that they might discover more vulnerabilities.
I disagree...it is MUCH better to have the entire program destroyed and no trace left whatsoever that the key logger/trojan/whatever you want to call it was there. That way a post mortem could not determine whether a specific machine was compromised.
What would be scarier to you if you were in charge of machines with valuable data on them - a warning that said there was a potential breach, and check here, here and here to see if you were affected, or a warning that said there was a potential breach, however there is no way to determine whether you were affected or not? The latter situation certainly sounds scarier to me (if I acutally had anything that mattered on my PC)
to the MS Outlook virus-propagation problem.
It's simple - create an Outlook virus which emails a Windows activation-code cracking program to everyone in the victim's address book. Then the virus would redirect the user to the warez sites where they could download "free" copies of Windows.
I can just about guarantee that Microsoft would have a patch within days, if not hours. After that, auto-execute for email attachments would be a thing of the past.
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Send your stolen information encrypted to a USENET group, and pick it up there. No connection traceable that way. And no one but you can read it. And out of the millions of messages...who else would know were to find it. Especially if you bounced it through some nym servers or mixmaster servers around the world a few times.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........