Mcafee's Spam Project.

Have you ever pondered to yourself, "What would happen if I left my computer without anti-virus, routine maintenance, or any care to be taken of it?" Do you imagine a zombie computer, revving its engine repeatedly in disgust of your lack of decent ownership?Well,Mcafee has released the results of its Spammed Persistently All Month campaign- So you do not have to wonder anymore.

The project asked a group of 70 users from 10 countries to surf the web unprotected and gather as much spam as possible.

The guinea pigs were able to amass a total of 104,000 spam messages, an average of 2,096 messages per person and 70 messages per day for each user.

Americans topped the spam haul, amassing 23,233 spam messages between five users. Brazil finished a distant second with 15,856 messages, and the UK was fifth with 11,965.

Participants in the study also noticed significant system slowdowns from unwanted software installations.

"In just 30 days there was quite a noticeable change in the performance of their computers," said McAfee Avert Labs senior vice president Jeff Green.

"This showed just how much malware was being installed without their knowledge, and that spam is much more than a nuisance. It is a very real threat. "

The US also led the study in the number of adult-oriented spam messages, while the UK received the highest number of Nigerian '419' messages. Brits received more than 23 per cent of the infamous money transfer scam attempts.

Financial services messages were the most popular spam topics, followed by advertisements and health and medicine messages. Adult emails were the fourth most-popular, while offers for free items were fifth and 419 scams tenth.

McAfee also noted an increasing number of location- and language-specific spam, particularly in France and Germany. The large spam loads in Brazil and Mexico also suggest a new focus on emerging economies.

"Our participants came from all walks of life, from all over the world and, given their interest to take part in the experiment, they were well aware of the problem," said McAfee chief executive Dave DeWalt.

"Despite this, they were all shocked by the sheer amount of spam they attracted in such a short time and the lengths the spammers would go to in order to achieve success."AA

Microsoft wants your Opinion?

In the continuing effort to improve computer and network security, Microsoft has developed the End to End Trust initiative. As a part of that initiative, Microsoft is seeking input from users and information security professionals to help answer the questions that need to be addressed in order to evolve computer security such as How should we enhance security on the Internet without undermining social values, such as privacy and anonymity? There are more questions to be answered in the End to End Trust Forums. Scott Charney, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Trustworthy Computing, has developed a white paper entitled Establishing End to End Trust which provides more details on Microsoft's vision.

While  it is not beyond the stretch of a reasonable person's imagination that a giant of the industry would want to keep it's users secure. The employees and designers of microsoft have showed a lack of willingness to address serious security issues, and wrap every tiny piece of security as the next big step in computing. Rather than the required software that all of this should have been back in Windows 98. It seems that every time Microsoft attempts security, it undoubtedly blows up in it's face. So I would encourage you to voice your opinion to microsoft- Let them know you value your security, as well as your wallet.

Is your cell phone vulnerable?

Recently, it was disclosed that a malformed JPEG image could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands on a MOTOROLA RAZR phone firmware.

A corrupt JPEG received via MMS can cause a memory corruption which can be leveraged to execute arbitrary code on the affected device.

So some user interaction is required — accepting the MMS. However, people by and large generally trust image files so that isn't a difficult social engineering challenge.

Perhaps we'll see this JPEG exploit used to simplify unlocking older Razrs. Jailbreaking the iPhone was simplified by a TIFF handling exploit after all.

However, next time that cute chick you met on myspace sends you an "Picture"- Think twice about opening it.

Wordpress SQL injection

Today it came out that there is yet another SQL injection in WordPress Blogs.


This code exploits the Wordpress Plugin Upload File, and allows an attacker to execute an arbitrary command on the hosting machine. If you host your Blog Locally, this is an enormous problem! The exploit (Discovered by a russian hacker http://eserg.ru ) ,  is one of a myriad of security issues recently exposed by Hackers- leaving bloggers worldwide vulnerable.  

What is a Arbitrary Command?
   This is when an attacker is able to exploit a security vulnerability in a program, to execute commands on YOUR computer. For example, in this case, By simply executing this SQL query
null/**/union/**/all/**/select/**/concat(user_login,0x3a,user_pass)/**/from/**/wp_users/*
On your server- he is able to add/remove users, Delete Files, and install any number of viruses.

Be on the lookout in the next week for a patch from www.wordpress.com/www.wordpress.org