We found an interesting phishing e-mail in our Spam mailbox this morning. (It got spam-filtered thanks to Intego Personal Antispam.) Unlike the usual phishing e-mails, there were no links in this one. In fact, if it were not from the suspicious reply-to address, and the poor English, it could almost be believable. Here’s what it said:
THIS MESSAGE IS FROM OUR TECHNICAL SUPPORT TEAM This message is sent
automatically by the computer.
If you are receiving this message it means that your email address has
been queued for deactivation; this was as a result of a continuous error
script (code:505)received from this email address. To resolve this problem
you must reset your email address. In order to reset this email address,
you must reply to this e-mail by providing us the following Information
for confirmation.Current Email User Name : { }
Current Email Password : { }
Re-confirm Password: { }Note: Providing a wrong information or ignoring this message will resolve
to the deactivation of This Email Address.You will continue to receive this warning message periodically till your
email address is been reset or deactivated.resolve
It is a simple technique for harvesting e-mail account info – user names and passwords – and we have the feeling that this might actually work. After all, many users are worried about entering their credit card numbers on-line, but may not be hesitant about sending an e-mail account password by e-mail.
Well, let’s get down to it: do not ever send any confidential information by e-mail! Never! The simple reason for this is that e-mail goes through many servers, and can be intercepted at any location along its route. Even if you wanted to send a password or other confidential information to, say, your spouse, don’t use e-mail. Unless you have some sort of encryption, all that information is sent in clear text, readable by anyone who hacks a server and sniffs data.
In this particular case, you should know that no network administrator will ask for your password by e-mail. They would call you, or, if it were for a business e-mail address, probably stop by your desk. In addition, there’s no reason to ask for a password to resolve any kind of incident with an e-mail account.
Just remember: phishing can come in many forms. Never send any confidential information by e-mail. Period.
Intego’s Virus Monitoring Center has come across an odd new program. Called lose/lose, this is a kind of alien-killer game like the venerable Space Invaders, but with a new twist. As the developer describes it on his web site,
Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted.
Hmm… You play a game and it deletes files? Your files? That doesn’t sound very good.
Developer Zach Gage claims that this is part of his MFA thesis, and while that’s certainly believable, it seems an odd way to write a thesis: a game that may delete user’s files is, quite frankly, a malicious program. Gage is trying to dress this up in philosophical concepts; he told us:
I would even argue that Lose/Lose does good and not harm, as it’s part of a project bringing this kind of matter to our attention. Part of it is about examining this flaw in our reasoning. We are so afraid of technology that we can become enraged just at the idea of a dangerous piece of software, even when that software is no more dangerous than dragging your files to the trash and deleting them yourself. In a world where so much of our lives are online, shouldn’t we have passed this fear by now? If we haven’t perhaps theres a greater danger to continuing to move forward into this technological future than we’ve come to terms with. When files on your computer are more important physical possessions, the rules of the game change. Imagine if someone could remotely delete furniture from your house, food from your fridge, or work from your desk? Wouldn’t you want to know even the basics of how that system worked before you integrated it so heavily into your life?
High-concept art is nothing new, but applying that to malicious computer programs certainly is. While the program has even been part of an Australian digital art exhibit, that doesn’t make it any better.
Malware as art could be fine in an exhibit, but releasing it in the wild is risky. Granted, the program has clear warnings about what it will do, both on pages where it can be downloaded, and on the game’s splash screen, but this will simply show that those who don’t read – or, perhaps, whose native languages are not English – may end up losing valuable files.
Intego is considering this as malware, with the name OSX/LoserGame, and VirusBarrier X5 with virus definitions dated October 28, 2009 or later will delete this game. If you see it, don’t try playing it, unless you really want to lose files.
The Mozilla foundation has released the latest update to its Firefox web browser, version 3.5.4. This update contains eleven security fixes, six of which are considered critical. Issues range from memory corruption to heap buffer overflows, from privilege escalation to memory safety issues. A list of these vulnerabilities can be found here.
Firefox users are strongly recommended to update the browser, either by choosing Help > Check for Updates or by downloading the latest version of Firefox here.
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