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New Worm Starts Munching MSN Users
Kosmik writes "It appears that MSN has been struck by a vindictive new worm, according to security company Panda Software. The worm, acting in the vein of movies like the Ring and FearDotCom, delivers a fateful terror message and then proceeds to disable most of your protection software like anti-virus,firewalls and even your Windows control apps (TaskManager, Regedit). It distributes itself to all your MSN contacts by sending a video called 'Fantasma.'"
So I connect to the MSN network but through a nice free little app called GAIM.
... or if it was a design decision by choice to avoid hidden viruses that the codecs unpack in the media files. Probably the latter.
My friends often try to send me files or pictures or videos through the MSN network and it doesn't work. They get annoyed and tell me to "just use MSN." I'm told that GAIM is stupid & crappy for not supporting these features.
Really makes you wonder if the people who developed gaim couldn't figure out how to make the videos/pictures stream through the chat box
GAIM also works on a number of other chat networks--as chat clients should. Another thing about chat clients is that they should stick to limited functionality. There are way more secure ways to transfer files. I don't want a profile, I don't want it integrated with my operating system (married to the kernel), I don't want media streaming, I just want to chat.
Don't bloat your software.
My work here is dung.
"on the 1st day you get scared, on the 2nd you get desperate, on the 3rd you look for help and on the 4th you die"
Panda did not provide information about the payload of the BlackAngel.B worm.
I think it's pretty clear what the payload is. Somebody better get a fix out for this quick...Like in the next 2 or 3 days!
This guy's the limit!
Or on windows, you could try Miranda
http://www.miranda-im.org/
A CNN poll taken recently showed that 98.1% of US citizens would rather have the MSN virus on their computer instead of the 1990 film in Spanish.
It's so unfortunate that we haven't invented the technology to "unwatch" films yet.
My work here is dung.
The only certainties in life are taxes and death, but it seems that it should be ammended for windows users with virus/worm infections.
So, did you pay taxes lately?
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
A trojan/virus/etc. that disables regedit and the task manager - and monkeys with files. This is not A Good Thing.
Many corporations support MSN Messenger only. Given a choice, however, I'm very fond of Trillian Pro 3. I found the license price for Trillian to be quite reasonable, considering its flexibility, stability, and the fact that (so far, fingers crossed) it has not been subject to attacks such as this.
A Passionate Independent Musician
This is so going to happen to my sister, and I am so not going to fix her computer this time.
Remember kids, don't constantly insult the person who fixes your computers.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
I don't much approve of destructive viri, but if they're going to be out there, they might as well have a little character to them. Who needs yet another boring old "spams your adress book and erases your HD" routine when you can be 0wned by something just a bit more interesting?
Reminds me of the good old days of "gimme a cookie."
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
From the article:
Ummmm... here's a hint: if somebody sends you a random URL to an executable, don't run it!
The More You Know
The Online Slang Dictionary
a video called 'Fantasma.'
Anyone read this quickly as 'Futurama'?
Normally I will question the brain of anyone who clicks a link without confirming with the person who sent it that it's not a virus, but all my friends know I love futurama clips.
Good news everyone, I can be socially engineered.
Through a vulnerability in MSN messenger, or is it just the usual "click here to get infected" method?
Lots of people complain that P2P is unsafe because it carries virusses and what not. So how come I have never been infected?
Obvious it is because of my enormous intellect that makes einstein look stupid and think that a 15mb .exe files claiming to be a movie is suspicious.
Yes granted the recent WMF crap showed us that if you use MS software any file extension is under suspiscion and the design choice by MS to hide the extension by default must rank as one of their most stupid one (then again this is ms, they make so many it is hard to determine wich one was their worsed).
But GAIM does not protect you from being stupid. Nothing does. Just that if you went through the trouble of installing GAIM on a Non-MS machine, or if you are on a MS-machine deliberatly disabled MSN and installed GAIM, then you are probably not that stupid.
It ain't GAIM that is keeping you safe, it is your brain. Trust me on this, I been around long enough to know people will do anything to get infected. Just promise them a juicy picture. We have about the same chance of stopping computer infection as we have of stepping Sexually Transmitted Diseases. When Miss Jpeg flirts with you, you don't think of using a condom. (Oh and using a condom isn't enough, deep kissing can do it too. How many of you practising safe sex make sure no fluids whatever are swapped?)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
from Pandas webpage
Countries affected
España 2.42
México 2.15
Perú 0.71
Chile 0.33
there are NO english speaking countries affected and the original site which hosted the file is dead (file removed i looked)
if today is AV fud promotion day you could at least try and scare us with a virus that affects English speaking countries
At least death doesn't get WORSE every year!!!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
News up next - Ursine defecation in arboreal context and spiritual leader found in Rome.
In this case the user is clicking on a hyper link in the IM Conversation which uses a web browser to download an external application. If someone on your buddy list sent you this message, it would come through with no problems. You could click the link and download the file with no problems. It could even execute it's payload while you are wrapped in your GAIM blanket of security. The only thing that it MIGHT not be able to do is to propagate itself to all of the members of your friends list.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Someone I met online recently sent me this message:
"I got my MSN names from http://www.im-names.com/ they're free!"
After getting this person to clarify that it was sent automatically. I said "OK, that's spyware." They said "I don't care." They are now blocked.
Gaim and some common sense means I'll never actually get the spyware, but it doesn't mean I won't get annoyed by it. After all, remember chain mail? I used to get chain IMs all the time -- "Send this to 25 friends by midnight and something good will happen!".
Really, the only solution, no matter what your IM client, is to start blocking morons.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Should be changed to "New Worm Starts Munching MSN Messenger Users". The MSN Messenging network and MSN are two different things.
w00t
*crunch* *crunch* *swallow*
Hmmm... tastes like chicken.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Do you also rail against email attachments?
Having supported a lot of moron users I can say that yes, email attachments are often a very Bad Thing. But mainly in the "when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail" sense. In some cases attachments are a good way of sending someone a file, but the clueless get too used to doing it that way and don't think of the consequences.
An example I saw a few years ago (which is a whole catalogue of cockups):
An estate agent did email-shots to prospective house buyers on a weekly basis. This mail shot consisted of an attached Word document containing descriptions and photos of properties. The photos were taken with something like a 2MP camera and they let Word "scale" them (read: the photos were imported in full resolution and then resized so they were still stored in the document at 2MP!). They would then mail-shot this (very large) document to around 500 email addresses. To make things worse, each week they took the last week's document and modified it, and Word in it's infinite wisdom keeps metadata about changes so the document got bigger each week.
By the time I got called in to fix their mail server (which had fallen over under the strain) I discovered several tens of gigabytes of mails queued for sending, many of them weeks old because it was now taking over a week to send the weekly mailings over their ADSL. And of course, almost all the mails were eventually getting bounced by the recipients' mail servers anyway because they were so big.
What they should've done is paid someone to set up a web site for them with a proper SQL backend to present the data they were mailing out. Clearly the users here were terminally clueless, but the point is that the software they were using made it far too easy to make each and every one of these mistakes.
So in summary, yes in some cases email attachments are useful, but I worry that they are frequently over-used because people get too comfortable using that feature for everything. Oh, and I don't believe most people have much legitimate need for sending executables over email so they should probably be automagically rejected.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
A dial up modem sounds good too... if you are into odd electronic music.
God Be Gone