Reuters - Microsoft Corp’s next version of Windows is stirring fresh complaints of anticompetitive behavior from rivals who say the new version of the operating system gives unfair advantage to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, the Financial Times reported.

Reuters - An unfinished pirated version of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” that hit the Internet March 30, well before the film’s No. 1 debut in theaters, has been downloaded some 4 million times, News Corp’s. 20th Century Fox said Wednesday.

WinFixer is closely related to Aurora Network’s Nail.exe hijacker/spyware program. In worst case scenarios, it may embed itself in Internet Explorer and become part of the program, thus being nearly impossible to remove. The program is also closely related to the Vundo and Virtumonde viruses. [3] - Note: The database entry for the Virtumonde trojan and WinFixer itself are down as of late February 2006), however, a great number of forum members on on-line technical support forums and blogs believe that WinFixer is associated with the Vundo trojan.

Program Name

Although purely speculative, it seems fairly obvious that the name WinFixer is derived from the old Microsoft Windows abbreviation “Win” joined with the word fixer, thus implying Win(dows) Fixer. Because of the name association with the operating system, a hypothetical situation could occur in which a user may possibly think that they are downloading a Windows related program, when, in fact, they are not.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Reuters - Walt Disney Co is developing an Internet subscription service and may consider trimming studio output, executives said on Tuesday after the division posted a 97 percent decline in operating income.

PC World - A Swedish man was indicted on Tuesday in connection with the alleged 2004 theft of source code for Cisco Systems’ IOS (Internetwork Operating System) software.

One case has closely associated spyware with identity theft. ^[1] In August 2005, researchers from security software firm Sunbelt Software believed that the makers of the common CoolWebSearch spyware had used it to transmit “chat sessions, user names, passwords, bank information, etc.” [1], but it turned out that “it actually is its own sophisticated criminal little trojan that’s independent of CWS.” [2] This case is currently under investigation by the FBI.

Spyware has pricipally become associated with identity theft in that keyloggers get routinely packaged within spyware. John Bambenek, who researches information security, estimates that identity-thieves have stolen over $24 billion US dollars worth of account information in the United States alone [3] .

Spyware-makers may perpetrate another sort of fraud with dialer program spyware: wire fraud. Dialers cause a computer with a modem to dial up a long-distance telephone number instead of the usual ISP. Connecting to the number in question involves long-distance or overseas charges, this can result in massive telephone bills, which the user must either pay or contest with the telephone company. Dialers are somewhat less effective today, now that fewer Internet users use dialup modems.

Digital rights management

Some copy-protection schemes, while they do serve the purpose of attempting to prevent piracy, also behave similarly to spyware programs. Some digital rights management technologies (such as Sony’s XCP) actually use trojan-horse tactics to verify a user as the rightful owner of the media in question.

References

1. ↑ Ecker, Clint (2005). Massive spyware-based identity theft ring uncovered. August 5, 2005.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

AP - Online retailers are shifting their marketing from traditional advertising to less expensive tools like Facebook.com and Twitter and e-mail as they seek market share or just work to retain customers, according to an industry study being released Tuesday.

Reuters - A California judge on Monday threw out a $45 million false advertising lawsuit against online advertising company ValueClick Inc, in a decision that defense attorneys said could blunt the most aggressive state law regulating commercial email.

E-mail and other forms of spamming have been used for purposes other than advertisements. Many early Usenet spams were religious or political in nature. Serdar Argic, for instance, spammed Usenet with historical revisionist screeds. A number of evangelists have spammed Usenet and e-mail media with preaching messages. A growing number of criminals are also using spam to perpetrate various sorts of fraud, and in some cases have used it to lure people to locations where they have been kidnapped, held for ransom and even murdered [1].

DoS spam

Spamming has also been used as a denial of service (”DoS”) tactic, particularly on Usenet. By overwhelming the readers of a newsgroup with an inordinate number of nonsense messages, legitimate messages can be lost and computing resources are consumed. Since these messages are usually forged (that is, sent falsely under regular posters’ names) this tactic has come to be known as sporgery (from spam + forgery). This tactic has for instance been used by partisans of the Church of Scientology against the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup (see Scientology vs. the Internet) and by spammers against news.admin.net-abuse.email, a forum for mail administrators to discuss spam problems. Applied to e-mail, this is termed mailbombing. The Usenet Meow Wars (circa 1996) were DoS attacks on various newsgroups aimed at specific posters, thus disrupting the newsgroups where they were active. The DoS attacks launched by Hipcrime, which continue today, are more specifically crafted as DoS attacks on entire newsgroups. The alt.sex newsgroups were rendered virtually uninhabitable by commercial porn site spammers, partially for advertising purposes and partially to destroy a perceived free competitor. (This spawned the creation of the moderated, unspammable soc.sexuality newsgroups.)

In a handful of cases, forged e-mail spam has been used as a tool of harassment. The spammer collects a list of addresses as usual, then sends a spam to them signed with the name of the person he wishes to harass. Some recipients, angry that they received spam and seeing an obvious “source”, will respond angrily or pursue various sorts of revenge against the apparent spammer, the forgery victim. A widely known victim of this sort of harassment was Joe’s CyberPost, which has lent its name to the offense: it is known as a joe job. Such joe jobs have been most often used against antispammers: in more recent examples, Steve Linford of Spamhaus Project and Timothy Walton, a California attorney, have been targeted. Sometimes victims (such as ROKSO-listed spammers) are subscribed to lists that don’t practice verified opt-in, such as magazine subscriptions and e-mail newsletters, a practise known as subscriptionbombing.

Spammers have also abused resources set up for purposes of anonymous speech online, such as anonymous remailers. As a result, many of these resources have been shut down, denying their utility to legitimate users.

E-mail worms or viruses may be spammed to set up an initial pool of infected machines, which then resend the virus to other machines in a spam-like manner. The infected machines can often be used as remote-controlled zombie computers, for more conventional spamming or DDoS attacks. Sometimes trojans are spammed to phish for bank account details, or to set up a pool of zombies without using a virus.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

A webmaster who wants to maximize the value of a web site can read the guidelines published by the search engines, as well as the coding guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium. If the guidelines are followed, and the site presents frequently updated, useful, original content, and a few meaningful, useful inbound links are established, it is usually possible to obtain a significant amount of organic search traffic.

When a site has useful content, other webmasters will naturally place links to the site, increasing its PageRank and flow of visitors. When visitors discover a useful web site, they tend to refer other visitors by emailing or instant messaging links.

As a result, SEO practices that improve web site quality are likely to outlive short term practices that simply seek to manipulate search rankings. The top SEOs recommend targeting the same thing that search engines seek to promote: relevant, useful content for their users.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.