Computer Technology News & Tips

A lot of you reading this are either aware or have encountered links to web sites that turned out to be fronts for hackers. This week, as reported by News.com, six people were arrested in Estonia for allegedly being a part of the creation of the malware program known as DNSChanger. The malware has infected over 4 million PCs, including 500,000 here in the US, and redirected the people who used those PCs to rogue web sites that generated ad money for the hacker team. A seventh suspect in Russia is still on the loose.

Basically this malware attack caused people who used those infected PCs to be redirected to rogue DNS servers, which then pointed them to specific web sites designed to raise money for the hackers. Those false servers were later shut down and replaced by real DNS servers in the hope that even people who have infected PCs will no longer be able to surf to those sites.

The FBI is currently letting people who might have an infected PC check to see if that is indeed the case via a special FBI web site. PCs which have the DNSChanger program installed are also prevented from updating their operating system or any anti-virus programs.

As always, the first rule in using your own PC is safety and that includes not clicking on web sites or emails that look suspicious. You never know when things could suddenly pop up while surfing the net.

Source: BitWise Computer Repair

LONDON — Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of cyber activists who targeted Visa and other Internet payment

sites that sought to block the WikiLeaks website after its release of U.S. diplomatic cables.

Facebook confirmed it had removed the activists’ Operation Payback site on Thursday because it was promoting a distributed denial of service attack — an illegal form of freezing websites. Twitter declined to comment.

The swoop against Operation Payback’s self-described campaigners for Internet freedom followed their online attacks on credit card giants like Visa and MasterCard.

The campaign reappeared on Twitter later in the European afternoon using another account. Experts said the outages were unlikely to have much effect on the pro-WikiLeaks cyber campaign as activists were using separate chatrooms to organize.

A representative of one of the groups involved in the online campaign said on Thursday that more cyber attacks in reprisal for attempts to block the WikiLeaks website were likely.

On Thursday, supporters of WikiLeaks were plotting attacks on online payment service PayPal and other perceived enemies of the publisher, which has angered U.S. authorities by starting to release details of 250,000 confidential cables.

Amazon was also cited as a target.

“The campaign is not over from what I’ve seen, it’s still going strong. More people are joining,” a spokesman calling himself “Coldblood” told BBC Radio 4. The speaker, who had an English accent, said he was aged 22 and was a software engineer.

“Anonymous has targeted mainly companies which have decided for whatever reason not to deal with WikiLeaks. Some of the main targets involve Amazon, MasterCard, Visa and PayPal.”

The websites of credit-card giants MasterCard and Visa have already been brought down through distributed denial-of-service attacks that temporarily disable computer servers by bombarding them with requests.

In a statement on Thursday, MasterCard said although there was a limited interruption of some online services, cardholders could continue using cards for transactions worldwide. Its main processing systems were not compromised, the statement said.

AnonOps also claimed responsibility for bringing down Visa’s site, which was temporarily unavailable in the United States, but later restored.

In an online letter, Anonymous said its activists were neither vigilantes nor terrorists. It added: “The goal is simple: Win the right to keep the Internet free of any control from any entity, corporation, or government.”

Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet said the Swedish government’s website was down for a short time overnight in the latest apparent attack.

Sweden has issued an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over sex crimes and he is in jail in London, awaiting an extradition hearing.

Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, has been hailed as an advocate of free speech by supporters, but now finds himself fighting serious sexual allegations made by two women in Sweden.

Assange will have another court appearance next Tuesday and his supporters assert he is being victimized for his work.

In the Internet Relay chat channel where activists coordinated the attacks, conversations were short and to the point. Participants asked what the target should be and reported progress. Some bemoaned the fact that paypal.com remained up despite efforts to bring down its transactions server.

“The only thing most of these CEOs understand is the bottom line. You have to hit them in the bank account, or not at all,” said one participant called Cancer.

WikiLeaks is continuing to drip-feed cables into the public domain despite the legal woes of its founder.

Those released on Thursday showed U.S. diplomats reporting that the illicit diamond trade in Zimbabwe had led to the murder of thousands, enriched those close to President Robert Mugabe and been financed in part by the central bank.

Assange’s online supporters hit the corporate website of MasterCard on Wednesday in reprisal for its blocking of donations to the WikiLeaks website.

“We are glad to tell you that http://www.mastercard.com/ is down and it’s confirmed!” said an entry on the Twitter feed of a group calling itself AnonOps.

“Coldblood” said a battle was under way to protect the Internet. “I see this as becoming a war, but not your conventional war. This is a war of data. We are trying to keep the Internet free and open for everyone, just the way the Internet always has been,” “Coldblood” added.

Assange’s main London lawyer has denied that the WikiLeaks founder ordered the attacks.

“It’s very hard to get hold of anyone from WikiLeaks. The only (person) you could really get hold of was Julian, but unfortunately he’s not available at the moment,” said “Coldblood.”

Source: MSNBC

IDG News Service – A hacker named Kirllos has a rare deal for anyone who wants to spam, steal or scam on Facebook: an unprecedented number of user accounts offered at rock-bottom prices.

Researchers at VeriSign’s iDefense group recently spotted Kirllos selling Facebook user names and passwords in an underground hacker forum, but what really caught their attention was the volume of credentials he had for sale: 1.5 million accounts.

IDefense doesn’t know if Kirllos’ accounts are legitimate, and Facebook didn’t respond to messages Thursday seeking comment. If they are legitimate, he has the account information of about one in every 300 Facebook users. His asking price varies from $25 to $45 per 1,000 accounts, depending on the number of contacts each user has.

To date, Kirllos seems to have sold close to 700,000 accounts, according to VeriSign Director of Cyber Intelligence Rick Howard.

Hackers have been selling stolen social-networking credentials for a while — VeriSign has seen a brisk trade in names and passwords for Russia’s VKontakte, for example. But now the trend is to go after global targets such as Facebook, Howard said.

Facebook has more than 400 million users worldwide, many of whom fall victim to scams each day. In one such scam, criminals send out messages from a compromised account, telling friends that the account’s owner is trapped in a foreign country and needs money to get home.

In another, they send Web links that lead to malicious software, telling friends that it’s a hilarious or sensationalistic video.

“People will follow it because they believe it was a friend that told them to go to this link,” said Randy Abrams, director of technical education with security vendor Eset. Once the malware gets installed, criminals can steal more passwords, break into bank accounts, or simply use the computers to send spam or launch distributed denial of service attacks. “There’s just a plethora of things that people can do if they can trick people into installing their software,” he said.

Kirllos’ Facebook prices are extremely cheap compared to what others are charging. In its most recent Internet Security Threat Report, Symantec found that e-mail usernames and passwords typically went for between $1 to $20 per account — Kirllos wants as little as $0.025 per Facebook account. More coveted credit card or bank account details can go for much more, ranging between $0.85 to $30 for credit card numbers to $15 to $850 for top-quality online bank accounts.

Source: ComputerWorld.com