Lure of a FREE PEN DRIVE : MALWARE'd

1.   If you are one of those guys who are regular to attend workshops, seminars, product launches , lectures...you must have got varying opportunities of getting hold of freebies in form of bags,brochures and PEN DRIVES....yess m sure the last one is a pure lure and most of the times everi one of us falls for it...be it a small capacity or a large capacity...the hand does not think twice before picking it up....but does any one of us realise that it may be these pen drives who become the first source of uploading some malware or a virus in your PC or laptop...the moment it is plugged in .....the machine is compromised.....unless the autorun is disabled...which in most of the cases is not.....

2.  The concept of zero day exploits has made it more dangerous....coz even if the user decides to run a antivirus scan...it will be shown free of any kind of virus or malware...the result is a silent compromise of the machine...however updated it remains in respect of OS or browsers or any application....the silent action in the background defies every lock of the user.Now all this is not based on some kind of imagination...there have been real life cases of which the one which made lots of noise is the IBM-AusCERT conference on the Gold Coast, Queensland, in which the free pendrives were infected by not one, but two pieces of malware.The details available at this link http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2010/05/21/ibm-distributes-usb-malware-cocktail-auscert-security-conference/

(CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE)

3.   In what must have been a highly embarrassing admission, IBM Australia sent an email to all AusCERT attendees warning them of the security screw-up...as shown in the screen shot above...besides this the famous stuxnet example was via pendrives lure....so if this is happening at such high levels of interactions,can the workshops u and me attend be left behind!!!!no way....so whats the way out?....best way is to buy one from a genuine store...(not sure how clean will that be?)...or still better refrain your self from picking one free pendrive.

DUQU's MICROSOFT LINK!!!

1.   While as on date the security and anti virus teams and experts across the globe are racing to find and unlock the details on DUQU,some useful information on the subject bug has been released by Microsoft,which says that hackers exploited a previously unknown bug in its Windows operating system to infect computers with the Duqu virus."We are working diligently to address this issue and will release a security update for customers," Microsoft said.But on the other hand the odds are that Microsoft won't patch the Windows kernel bug next week that the Duqu remote-access Trojan exploits to plant itself on targeted PCs.

2.   Meanwhile,Symantec researchers said they consider hackers sent the virus to targeted victims via emails with infected Microsoft Word documents attached. If a recipient opened the Word document and infected the PC, the attacker could take control of the machine and reach into an organization's network to propagate itself and hunt for data, Symantec researcher Kevin Haley told Reuters. 

3. Thanks http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com and http://www.computerworld.com

SOME MORE ON DUQU

Some more good info and FAQs on DUQU.....AT
http://www.secureworks.com/research/threats/duqu/

DUQU : FROM THE GEN STUXNET????

1.  Do u remember the gr8 STUXNET...who hit the cyber theatres about a year back?....i call it gr8 since that was the first piece of trojan which the experts called with words like marvelous,the world's first 'open source weapon'.....the code which shocked the experts...though it was meant to target Siemens industrial software and equipment running Microsoft Windows....but the percentage affected was enough to do the early damage and show the trailor of what  can come ahead....now comes another in the offering which Researchers from Symantec say is likely written by the same authors and based on the same code.This is known as DUQU.....also coming to be known as “Son of Stuxnet” and a “precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack.”

2. But another analyses by security researchers from Dell suggest Duqu and Stuxnet may not be closely related after all. That’s not to say Duqu isn’t serious, as attacks have been reported in Sudan and Iran. But Duqu may be an entirely new breed, with an ultimate objective that is still unknown.“Both Duqu and Stuxnet are highly complex programs with multiple components,” Dell says. “All of the similarities from a software point of view are in the ‘injection’ component implemented by the kernel driver. The ultimate payloads of Duqu and Stuxnet are significantly different and unrelated. 

3. The security vendor Bitdefender has also cast doubt on the supposed Duqu/Stuxnet link in its Malwarecity blog. “We believe that the team behind the Duqu incident are not related to the ones that released Stuxnet in 2010, for a number of reasons,” BitDefender’s Bogdan Botezatu writes. While a rootkit driver used in Duqu is similar to one identified in Stuxnet, that doesn’t mean it’s based on the Stuxnet source code.

4. Now till date,DUQU was reportedly seen infecting machines in and around IRAN......but now the Symantec version reported is that a server machine in aamchi Mumbai is effected by this new VIRUS!!!!!!!Indian authorities seized computer equipment from a data center in Mumbai as part of an investigation into the Duqu malicious software that some security experts warned could be the next big cyber threat. Two workers at a web-hosting company called Web Werks told Reuters that officials from India's Department of Information Technology last week took several hard drives and other components from a server that security firm Symantec Corp told them was communicating with computers infected with Duqu. 

5. So DUQU is here in INDIA.......and I m sure with the high percentage of pirated software users in India....we r the most vulnerable to such kinds of threat.....be updated...buy genuine....keep taking updates to avoid being EXPLOITED by EXPLOITS..................

6. Thanks http://arstechnica.com