Report: Google's Orkut fights off worm attack
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Worm creates scrapbook entries on Orkut profiles and then propagates to friends on the network.
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(InfoWorld) - Google has offered Indian police a special tool for priority reporting of objectionable material on its social networking site, Orkut. Google's Orkut social networking site has come in for criticism and even litigation from groups in India that object to its depiction of India and Indian historic figures. The site also has fan clubs of Indian gangsters, and Indian police said these could be used to find new recruits. The reporting tool does not affect the way Google treats users' data but only enables faster, direct communication, a spokeswoman for Google said Tuesday. Â  The police will still be required to follow an appropriate legal process in order to get user-identifying information, she added. Some Indian newspapers and a TV channel have quoted a police official in Mumbai saying that Orkut agreed to provide the police with the IP address from which an objectionable message has been posted on the site and the ISP involved. The Google spokeswoman confirmed that the company's legal team met with police from various states in India but said there was no question of Google sharing IP addresses with the Indian police without the appropriate legal process being followed. The process for reporting objectionable material on Orkut remains the same, as do Google's own procedures for deciding whether or not to remove the material from the site, she added.
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Antivirus companies are warning Internet users about a fast-spreading new worm that infects Web servers running a popular package of online bulletin board software, and uses the Google search engine to find vulnerable servers to infect.
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InfoWorld - Google has offered Indian police a special tool for priority reporting of objectionable material on its social networking site, Orkut.
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A new worm uses the search engine Google to find vulnerable systems, automatically connect to them, and deface a Web site. By Thomas Claburn.
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MANHASSET, NY - The average unpatched Linux system survives for months on the Internet before being hacked, a report recently issued by the Honeypot Project claims.
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Google has provided Brazilian authorities with data about Orkut users in response to 30 court orders, according to company spokespersons, and it plans to respond to eight more orders before their deadlines expire.
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Although Google moved fast to stop the original Santy worm, it apparently was not fast enough. Santy variants are making the rounds using the AOL and Yahoo search engines, according to security firms.
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Google said it was blocking searches generated by a new worm, Santy.A, which were being used to find and infect vulnerable computers on the Internet.
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Google, the paid-search advertising company, has been hit by a computer worm this week which used its website to disable potentially tens of thousands of internet notice boards.
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The Web is scarier than most people realize, according to research published recently by Google.The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.These Web-based attacks, called &quot;drive-by downloads&quot; by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers.In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore&#39;s An Inconvenient Truth movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim&#39;s browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim&#39;s PC. &quot;The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks,&quot; said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.Some of the data surprised Provos.&quot;When we started going into this, I had the firm intuition that if you go to the sleazier parts of the Web, you are in more danger,&quot; he said.It turns out the Web&#39;s nice neighborhoods aren&#39;t necessarily safer than its red-light districts.&quot;We looked into this and indeed we found that if you ended up going to adult-oriented pages, your risk of being exposed [to malicious software] was slightly higher,&quot; he said. But &quot;there really wasn&#39;t a huge difference.&quot;&quot;Staying away from the disreputable part of the Internet really isn&#39;t good enough,&quot; he noted.Another interesting finding: China was far and away the greatest source of malicious Web sites. According to Google&#39;s research, 67 percent of all malware distribution sites are hosted in China. The second-worst offender? The U.S., at 15 percent, followed by Russia (4 percent), Malaysia (2.2 percent), and Korea (2 percent).It costs next to nothing to register a Web domain in China and service providers are often slow to shut down malicious pages, said Thompson. &quot;They&#39;re the Kleenex Web sites,&quot; he said. Criminals &quot;know they&#39;re going to be shut down, and they don&#39;t care.&quot;Malicious site operators in China fall into two broad categories, Thompson said: Fraudsters looking to steal your banking password, and teenagers who want to steal your World of Warcraft character.So how to stop this growing pestilence?Google&#39;s Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic updates on. &quot;You should always run your software as updated as possible and install some kind of antivirus technology,&quot; he said.But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about building secure Web sites. &quot;I think it will take concentrated efforts on all parts,&quot; for the problem to go away, he said.
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(InfoWorld) - A critical flaw in the way that the AOL's instant messaging client, AIM,Â displays Web-based graphics could be exploited by criminals to create a self-copying worm attack, security researchers are warning. The flaw was discovered by researchers at Core Security Technologies, which has been working with AOL over the past few weeks to patch the problem. AOL's servers are now filtering instant messaging traffic to intercept any attacks, but the company has yet to patch the underlying problem in its client software, security researchers said Tuesday. The flaw has to do with the way the AIM software uses Internet Explorer's software to render HTML messages. By sending a maliciously encoded HTML message to an AIM user, an attacker could run unauthorized software on a victim's computer or force the IE browser to visit a maliciously encoded Web page, said Core CTO IvÃ¡n Arce. This type of flaw could be exploited to create a self-replicating worm attack, according to both Core's Arce and Aviv Raff, a security researcher who on Tuesday reported that he'd discovered a related flaw in AIM. "The frightening thing about this vulnerability is that it can be easily exploited to create a massive IM worm, because it doesn't require any user interaction," Raff said. No attacks based on these flaws have been reported. Computer worms were front page news in 2003 and 2004 when Blaster, Sobig, and Sasser gummed up PCs around the world. And while Web-based worms have been in the news, a widespread instant messaging worm would be something new. Arce says that the safest thing is for AIM users to either upgrade to the 6.5 beta code or to downgrade to a 5.9 version of the software, which does not support the HTML rendering capability. But Raff offered different advice, saying that AIM 6.5 is still vulnerable to the flaw he discovered. According to him the best thing would be for AOL to "fix the underlying code," although AIM 5.9 is "probably not vulnerable to this specific vulnerability," he said. AOL may not be planning to fix its AIM code any time soon, according to a statement provided by the company late Tuesday. "We have resolved all of the issues presented to us by Core Security within all past, current, and future versions of AIM," AOL said without commenting on Raff's findings. Users should still be concerned, however. Core's Arce said that he was worried that hackers could find ways around AOL's filters. What AOL has done is "just one portion of the solution, and that's not the most effective portion," he said. "The most effective solution is to run a client that doesn't have the problem."
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A new worm can spy on users by hijacking their Web cameras, a security firm warned Monday. The Rbot.gr worm -- the latest in a long line of similar worms; one security firm estimates that more
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Google acted quickly to block Santy.A, a worm that targeted the company&#39;s popular Internet search engine. Antivirus experts say this threat has passed, but predict that it may be just
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The Santy worm, which originally flared up a week ago as bulletin board Web sites found their pages erased and defaced by the worm&#39;s own text, has begun to spread using both Google and other search engines.
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Attackers could exploit this vulnerability to create a self-replicating worm attack. No attack code has yet been found in the wild, but users are cautioned to patch as soon as possible.
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Two Google site vulnerabilities that could be used to mount phishing attacks have been reported, says the Internet search giant. It already has fixed one, and expects to patch the second shortly.