A virus masking itself as the 'Facebook Password Reset Confirmation email' is on the prowl
Facebook can also ruin fun. Saikat Debnath, a resident of Rohini in Delhi, learnt this lesson the hard way. The 23-year-old Engineering student's life turned upside down when he could not access his Facebook and email accounts. This is not all. He also had to spend big bucks to repair his laptop.
One wrong click on an email that appeared to come from the social networking site Facebook landed Debnath into this mess.
According to cyber experts, a new virus is spreading on name of the social networking site. Facebook. The virus Bredolab disguised as a "Password Reset Confirmation Email," appears to come from Facebook, which makes it easy fool netizens.
Delhi-based cyber crime expert Vivek vohra said, "Bredolab attaches a file that purports to contain a new password. That file is a trojan horse that will download a host of nasty files from the Web."
"I got an email with the subject "Facebook Password Reset Confirmation". The email read: to provide safety to our client, passwords have been changed. You can find your new password in the attached document. After opening the file, I realised it was a spoof email," said the disappointed Debnath.
Later, Debnath was taken aback when he couldn't access his email and Facebook accounts.
"My accounts have been disabled. Every time I try to log in it tells me 'wrong password'. Even my operating system collapsed. When I took my laptop to the technician, he told an infected file has corrupted the system," he said.
Talking about the new ways of attacking innocent users, Vohra said, "Cyber crooks are coming up with new viruses to steal email id and all the personal details of netizens. It is always suggested to check every link and attachment before opening them." "Unlike the Facebook phishing attacks last year, when bad links were distributed through hacked user accounts, now the name of social networking sites are being used."
According to the Facebook team, the spoof email containing the virus wasn't coming from the social networking site.
Facebook said that this virus is being distributed through email. We never send users a new password as an attachment.
"We're educating users on how to detect this through the Facebook Security Page," the company blog post added.
"To avoid getting the virus, do not open a "Password Reset Confirmation E-mail" if you didn't request a password from Facebook," the cyber expert said.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Change facebook password at your own risk
Saturday, October 3, 2009
IBM Aims To Undercut Gmail
Big Blue's new $3 a month enterprise e-mail service could steal market share from Google.
IBM's brand may not stand up to Google's in terms of inspiring excitement. But when it comes to the reliability and security of a service like e-mail, Big Blue is hoping to sell the good kind of boring.IBM ( IBM - news - people ) on Monday is expected to release its first Web-based e-mail offering, an enterprise-focused addition to Lotus Notes it calls iNotes. The service will let users pick their domain name and will debut at $3 per month, a price aimed directly at undercutting Google's ( GOOG - news - people ) $50 per year and the $10 to $12 per month that Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people ) charges for its Webmail services. Though Microsoft offers one version of Webmail for $2 a month, IBM says it will offer 1 gigabyte of storage, twice the amount of Webmail.
IBM's e-mail gambit stems from its acquisition of the messaging assets of Outblaze; the deal closed in April and IBM will inherit 18 million customers.
But the service's timing may be based on more than the mere integration of IBM's Outblaze buyout: Google has spent the year trying to recoup from repeated outages of Gmail, including its own enterprise email service--the online applications have been unavailable for multi-hour windows three times so far this year.
IBM is hoping to tap into its reputation as a trusted outsourcer to show that it can do better. "We run the world's most mission critical systems for banks, telcos and utilities," says Sean Poulley, IBM's vice president of online collaboration services. "It's fair to say we're pretty trusted."
Dave Girouard, president of Google's enterprise division, defends Gmail, saying that it still offers 99.9% reliability--far greater than the average e-mail service many companies run themselves. As for competition with Google, he points out that IBM's 1 gigabyte of storage space is far inferior to the 25 gigs that Google offers.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Digital ants to the rescue!
Swarms of digital ants may soon crawl all over the internet, scouting not for food, but computer worms and self-replicating programs designed to steal information or facilitate unauthorised use of machines. Security experts have successfully deployed a new type of network security software which mimics the habits of real-world ants.
Ants on earth, for instance, wander randomly but return to their colonies when they find food. But on the way back, they leave behind pheromone trails.
If other ants find the trail, they follow it and reinforce it. The idea of the ant colony algorithm follows this pattern. The digital ants wander through computer networks. When an ant detects a threat, other ants converge on the scene, drawing the attention of human operators who step in to investigate.
"In nature, we know that ants defend themselves against threats very successfully," Wake Forest Professor of Computer Science Errin Fulp, an expert in security and computer networks, said in a press statement, adding: "They can ramp up their defence rapidly, and then resume routine behaviour quickly after an intruder has been stopped. We were trying to achieve that same framework in a computer system."
Digital ants are an application of Swarm Intelligence or SI. Examples of this concept abound in nature, and include ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth, and fish schooling. SI, which refers to a general set of algorithms, was made popular in works of fiction like Prey from Michael Crichton, where a swarm of nano-robots attacks humans as experiments go wrong, and robotic sentinels in movies like The Matrix.
Using SI, these digital ants adapt to the variations of viruses that hackers routinely introduce. This is critical since security programs gobble up more resources, and antivirus scans take longer and machines run slower when anti-virus packages discover new threats and issue updates.
Glenn Fink, a research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, came up with the idea of copying ant behaviour. PNNL, one of ten Department of Energy laboratories, conducts cutting-edge research in cyber security.
Fink was familiar with Fulp's expertise developing faster scans using parallel processing – dividing computer data into batches like lines of shoppers going through grocery store checkouts, where each lane is focused on certain threats.
He invited Fulp and Wake Forest graduate students Wes Featherstun and Brian Williams to join a project there this summer that tested digital ants on a network of 64 computers. SI, the approach developed by PNNL and Wake Forest, divides the process of searching for specific threats.
"Our idea is to deploy 3,000 different types of digital ants, each looking for evidence of a threat," Fulp said. "As they move about the network, they leave digital trails modelled after the scent trails ants in nature use to guide other ants. Each time a digital ant identifies some evidence, it is programmed to leave behind a stronger scent. Stronger scent trails attract more ants, producing the swarm that marks a potential computer infection."
Fulp says the new security approach is best suited for large networks that share many identical machines, such as those found in governments, large corporations and universities.
And computer users need not worry that a swarm of digital ants will decide to take up residence in their machine by mistake. Digital ants cannot survive without software "sentinels" located at each machine, which in turn report to network "sergeants" monitored by humans, who supervise the colony and maintain ultimate control.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Google Injects Search Savvy Into Display Ad System
Google Draws Upon Expertise in Search Advertising to Sell More Visual Marketing Messages
Google Inc. is counting on the crown jewel of its online advertising empire to burnish a diamond in the rough.
The long-awaited combination poses another threat to Yahoo Inc., whose profits have been sliding the past three years. Yahoo is the Internet's largest seller of display advertising, a mantle that Google has set its sights on. Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL also operate large exchanges that help manage display ads.
The upgrade announced Friday has been something Google has been working toward since it bought DoubleClick Inc. for $3.2 billion a year-and-a-half ago. Google prized DoubleClick largely for its tools for selling and serving display ads.
Although they are more dynamic, display ads so far haven't proven to be as popular as the text ads that appear alongside search results. Last year, online search advertising sales in the United States totaled $10.5 billion, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, with most of that money going to Mountain View, Calif.-based Google. The Internet's U.S. display ads totaled $7.6 billion.
"The display market today is probably not really living up to its full potential," said Neal Mohan, a Google vice president of product management.
Google is betting it can sell more display ads by drawing on the science, simplicity and ease-of-use that has made its search advertising system so profitable. The marriage will open DoubleClick's display advertising system to hundreds of thousands of advertisers and Web sites that belong to AdWords and AdSense — the cornerstones of Google's commercial search.
"We are going to be bringing a lot of the know-how and a lot of the efficiencies of the search market to the art of display," Mohan said.
NEXTSTEP.TCS.COM SERVER ERROR
Buddha govt offers 45 acres each to Wipro and Infosys
West Bengal government on Thursday offered 45 acres each to Wipro and Infosys for setting up units at
Rajarhat, said Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee.
"I'm proposing today (Thursday), through the media, that we are ready to give 45 acres of land each to Wipro and Infosys. If they agree to the proposal, they can come and immediately take possession of the land and start new centres," Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee told a press conference at the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) state headquarters.
"These companies can create 16,000 jobs in two years. I already had a talk with my cabinet colleagues, IT Minister Debesh Das, Housing Development Minister Gautam Deb and others about the proposal. We will start talking to the companies. The price of the land will be negotiated with them," Bhattacharjee said, adding that the land will be given on lease to both the IT giants.
On the infrastructure, he said that Rajarhat area already had housing, market complexes and road facilities.
"Now the state government will talk to these companies with the proposal. We can immediately hand over the proposed land to them (Wipro and Infosys).
"A few months back we'd identified land near Vedic Village area to set up an IT township there. But we didn't have any idea that they were acquiring land with muscle power and also with the help of some anti-social elements. Some unfortunate things also happened there... I was little upset with that," the chief minister said.
He said that the state government immediately dropped the project and decided not to go ahead with it as it was not morally correct, following the trouble that erupted over Vedic Reality - a joint venture between the private party and state's key IT agency Webel.
The proposed IT township at Rajarhat near Salt Lake had become controversial following allegations that land sharks - allegedly backed by promoters of Vedic Realty - had been involved in land acquisitions.
The state government depended on Vedic Realty to get land for the 1,600-acre IT project.
Both Infosys and Wipro had sought 90 acres from the state government for their ventures. ITC Infotech was also eyeing space in the IT hub.
Bhattacharjee said the land was already with the state government and they would just have to change the land map at Rajarhat slightly to accommodate the IT players.
Dell Introduces Servers, Storage for SMBs
To help growing businesses achieve greater IT efficiency, Dell has introduced a range of enterprise products designed specifically to meet the needs of SMBs. These products are designed to simplify operations, reduce downtime, enhance information security and reduce operating cost.
The new portfolio includes four 11th Generation Dell PowerEdge servers, Lifecycle Controller 1.2 embedded systems management, the PowerVault NX300 network attached storage (NAS) device, Dell Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) and Dell ProConsult services to help growing businesses achieve greater IT efficiency.
The new Dell PowerEdge servers enable businesses to monitor, and maintain with the inclusion of advanced systems management technologies. While the Dell Lifecycle Controller 1.2 simplifies deployment and saves time and money by pre-loading the correct drivers for all the operating systems and components on Dell PowerEdge servers.
The new Dell servers are engineered to save energy and save money. The PowerEdge R210 is 88 percent more energy efficient than the previous generation, and the PowerEdge T310 is 65 percent more energy efficient than its predecessor.