Free Republic

never had this one. an ebay spoof? locked me up and says I need to pay to unlock due to some US code violation claim(BS) in the past I could do a system restore to an earlier date but it won't let me do that either. it bypassed AVG and I cannot get to my malwarebytes program via safe mode either. windows vista home premier is what I have

"When people don't see stuff on Google, they think no one can find it. That's not true." That's according to John Matherly, creator of Shodan, the scariest search engine on the Internet. Unlike Google, which crawls the Web looking for websites, Shodan navigates the Internet's back channels. It's a kind of "dark" Google, looking for the servers, webcams, printers, routers and all the other stuff that is connected to and makes up the Internet. (Shodan's site was slow to load Monday following the publication of this story.) Shodan runs 24/7 and collects information on about 500 million connected devices and...

Aren’t you glad Shodan is in the hands of good guys like John Matherly?Ask John Matherly if he’s a hacker, and he’ll struggle for a moment with the term. On one hand, he’s a hacker, in the sense that he’s an innovative programmer, arms deep in the information-security industry. On the other, he’s hypersensitive to how his baby—a project called Shodan—is portrayed in the press. In the past year, it’s surged in notoriety and not just in technology publications, such as Ars Technica and Wired. Shodan’s been the subject of multiple Washington Post investigative features, profiled on Dutch television and...

Malwarebytes takes a look at a method cyber-criminals have begun using to target Mac users with "ransomware", hijacking the user's browser with a notice demanding payment of $300 in order to release control of the application. While similar malware has affected Windows systems for a number of years, Mac users have only rarely seen such efforts targeted at themselves. The ransomware page is being pushed onto unsuspecting users browsing regular sites but in particular when searching for popular keywords. Warnings appearing to be from the FBI tell the victim: “you have been viewing or distributing prohibited Pornographic content.. To unlock...

Questions to Freepers using Firefox browser. I understood Adobe was open to hacking, malware and rootkits I use a Firefox browser. I have not been updating my Flash plug-in. Now, I cannot view embedded videos without updating Adobe Flash. Are substitutes available? Are the newer versions of Adobe Flash now secure??

Abstract. We describe the use of formal methods in the development of IRONSIDES, an implementation of DNS with superior performance to both BIND and Windows, the two most common DNS servers on the Internet. More importantly, unlike BIND and Windows, IRONSIDES is impervious to all single-packet denial of service attacks and all forms of remote code execution. Introduction DNS is a protocol essential to the proper functioning of the Internet. The two most common implementations of DNS are the free software version BIND and the implementations that come bundled with various versions of Windows. Unfortunately, despite their ubiquity and...

It’s a clear case of Patch Tuesday envy that drives Oracle to release so many security patches. There’s no way Java could need that many critical updates. This one will get your attention with critical patches addressing 40 vulnerabilities. Oracle ordinarily releases Critical Patch Updates four times a year on a set schedule, but this will already be the fourth such update issued in 2013.

The Washington Free Beacon yesterday became the latest victim in a wave of cyber attacks targeting conservative news outlets. The Beacon, in what appears to be a coordinated assault, joined National Journal and radio station WTOP as a target after certain articles were featured on the Drudge Report, one of the most heavily trafficked and influential sites in the world. The Drudge Report itself has not been infiltrated. “There seems to be this concerted effort by this cyber criminal to take over news sites,” said Steve Ward, vice president of Invincea, the Internet security company that first identified the Free...

On April 25, Spanish police, at the request of Holland's national prosecutor's office, arrested Dutch citizen Sven Olaf Kamphuis. Kamphuis will likely face charges in Holland related to what Dutch officials describe as the most extensive criminal cyberattacks in the history of the Internet. The attacks, which occurred in mid-March, overwhelmed the website of Spamhaus, a European nonprofit organization that tracks computer viruses (malware) and spam (unwanted email). Spamhaus had blacklisted Kamphuis' Internet company, CyberBunker. Spamhaus alleged that CyberBunker provided hosting services for spammers. The attacks (distributed denial of service, DDOS attacks) not only denied Internet users access to the...

CSO - Apache servers are being ambushed by a particularly pernicious malware program called Linux/Cdorked.A that's infecting visitors to the sick machines with the Blackhole malware kit. Discovered by security researchers at Sucuri and Eset, they describe the malware a a sophisticated and stealthy backdoor meant to drive traffic to malicious websites. Eset explained in a blog post that the malware is one of the most sophisticated Apache backdoors it has seen so far. So far, hundreds of servers have been compromised, it said. The backdoor leaves no traces of compromised hosts on the hard drive other than a modified...

Patches 42 security holes Oracle has released a major security update for the version of Java programming language that runs inside Web browsers. The patch fixes 42 vulnerabilities within Java, including "the vast majority" of those that have been rated as the most critical. Oracle Executive Vice President Hasan Rizvisaid that a series of big security flaws in the Java plug-in for browsers have been uncovered in the past year by researchers and hackers, and some have been used by criminal groups. One hacking campaign infected computers using Microsoft Windows and Apple software inside hundreds of companies.Earlier this year the US Department...

Young man's blog provides a rare glimpse of the secretive hacking establishment of the Chinese military, whose efforts have become a growing concern to the U.S. BEIJING — For a 25-year-old computer whiz enlisted in a People's Liberation Army hacking unit, life was all about low pay, drudgery and social isolation.Nothing at all like the unkempt hackers of popular imagination, the young man wore a military uniform at work in Shanghai. He lived in a dorm where meals often consisted of instant ramen noodles. The workday ran from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., although hackers were often required to work...

The U.S. is a victim of a massive and sustained campaign of cyber espionage, according to a classified intelligence assessment revealed by the Washington Post on Monday. These periodic assessments, officially called National Intelligence Estimates (NIE), are issued by the Director of National Intelligence to express the general consensus of the intelligence community and to inform policymakers. That the United States is the target of a large cyber espionage campaign seems like a foregone conclusion, given recent developments. In the last few weeks, there have been reports of complex cyber attacks against papers like the New York Times or The...

A massive computer shutdown of two South Korean banks and media companies occurred Wednesday via an Internet malware attack. The malware wiped out the master boot records on the hard drives of the infected computers, overwriting the MBR with either one of these strings: PRINCPESPR!NCPESHASTATI. Figure 1: Snapshot of MBR after infection.The attack also overwrote random parts of the file system with the same strings, rendering several files unrecoverable. So even if the MBR is recovered, the files on disk will be compromised too.After that, the system is forced to reboot via the following command: shutdown -r -t 0 That...

The cyber attack that rocked South Korean TV stations and banks yesterday apparently wiped out the hard drives of the affected computers, according to an analysis of the incident by McAfee. The involved malware infections destroyed the master boot record of the hard drives of the machines attacked. The MBR on a hard drive contains crucial information on how file systems on the drive are organized. The malware involved overwrote data in the MBR with the following string of characters: “PRINCPES, PR!NCPES, HASTATI.” It also overwrote random parts of the file system with the same characters.After that the system was...

A new virus specific to Mac has been discovered by Russian security firm Doctor Web. Named Trojan.Yontoo.1, the virus injects ads into webpages on the infected machine.    The malware works by installing an adware plugin into any of the popular browsers then overlays an advertisement in key locations on webpages. Doctor Web says that this trojan is just another piece of a large adware puzzle that has been infecting OS X for some time now.    The virus can be caught in several different ways, with the most popular method being the use of movie trailer pages in which...

I am fed up with, and don't even go to, a number of websites that make it impossible to close their pop-ups--I mean there isn't even a button to do so--or else, when you close the pop-up, an entirely new, screen-filling WINDOW opens. Townhall, CanadaFreePress, NRO, NewsMax, and many others are guilty of this kind of aggression. I'm sick of it. I never even look at what they are hawking, and now, I won't click any links on FR to these sites until I hear that they've cleaned up their act.

A few weeks ago we were advised to disable or uninstall JAVA because of some malware. Is that problem now fixed? Do any Freepers have a suggestion for a trusted download site to reinstall JAVA?

MS-ISAC CYBER ALERT DATE ISSUED: February 21, 2013 SUBJECT: www.nbc[.]com Contains a Malicious iframe MS-ISAC received reports and independently confirmed that the website www.nbc[.]com contains a malicious iframe which includes links to the following URLs: • flying-gators-mac[.]com/mtnk.htm • finesseindia[.]com/mtnk.htm • toplineops[.]com/mtnk.html • nikweinstein[.]com/cl/google.php • moi-npovye-sploett[.]com/qqqq/1.php • walterjeffers[.]com • symptomshighbloodpressure[.]org • store.thermosolutionsinternational[.]com/ctuk.html Please note that there may be additional domains included in the rotation. Once any of the above domains are visited, the Redkit exploit kit is leveraged to exploit number of vulnerabilities to install a Citadel malware on to the victim system. You may recall that the Redkit exploit kit...

February 15, 2013, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Mobile users tempted to visit pornographic websites on their smartphones have another reason to think twice before clicking on the link: they could find their phones infected with malware. According to a new study from Blue Coat Systems, the risk of finding malicious content is three times higher when visiting x-rated websites than any other type of mobile activity. Nearly one-quarter of all malware on smartphones is found after visiting a pornographic site, even though porn use makes up a small percentage of user activity on mobile devices. The Blue Coat report described porn as...