Some guy asked me to draw a gorilla fighting a robot
....considering it took about five minutes in MS Paint (and managed to hat-tip everything from Olive Oyl to The Matrix amongst other things), I think it's a pretty damn good gorilla / robot slapfest. Once you've worked out what order the panels read, of course.
Anyway, I can't think of anyone else that announces a week long holiday with gorilla-on-robot action. You too should draw your own battle of the titans and post a link here. When I return, I'll post a bunch of them up because, hey, robots are awesome.
Gorillas less so, but they have their place (being smacked up by robots, mostly).
The Super Duper Late Edition of The Spywareguide Roundup
....oh, all sorts of things, WTF Cat!
For example, this past week we've seen....
* Automated Spim on Microblogging Site Via MSN Messenger - I thought this was a clever way of zinging out automated spim on sites similar to Twitter. Naughty, naughty spammers.
* CNN Spam - There's been all sorts of spam shenanigans going on this past week or so, hasn't there? [1], [2]
* Marketing Bot Allows Insertion of Custom Facebook Feed Messages - I think this is a very bad idea.
* Spamblogs Pushing Rogue Antivirus Programs - Nothing Earth-shaking, but always worth keeping an eye on this kind of thing.
* Trust No One? - An interesting email that's either legit, fake or somewhere inbetween. I'm going to be digging into this one a bit more, hopefully.
* A Dark Knight for Zango - A three part wing-dinger, with thrills, spills and chills!
Also, pirate movies.
Anyway, that's it for this week! If I'm late with the roundup again, may WTF Cat beat me soundly with a wet kipper.
Sometimes Funky Features = More Pain. Automated Spim on Microblogging site...
As far as I'm aware, if you want to send messages on Twitter via things like MSN Messenger, you have to gimp around with Plugins or third party services and stuff (I believe it's more straightforward if using clients such as Jabber, Google Talk etc). On some of the other sites offering services similar to Twitter though, it's a bit easier to do. And if I can work out how to do it on a Chinese language website in less than a minute, anyone can.
With that in mind, wouldn't it be deliciously evil if a bad guy (say) created an infection which spammed Twitter-style messages automatically (via MSN Messenger) directly to the Twitter-style pages on a site such as Fanfou.com, thus taking their helpful feature of MSN functionality and twisting it for the purposes of Evil, instead of Good?
The "better late than never" mid-week Spywareguide roundup
Don't get up, Rocky! Stay down! Stay down!!!
Unfortunately, I'm a sucker for being punched in the face so here we go again...
* The Wall-E Demo Saga - At the end of last week, it appeared a version of the Wall-E Demo was being flagged as something quite horrible (even more horrible than that montage in Rocky 2 where Rocky and Apollo clearly have the hots for each other in slo-mo style on that beach. Stay down, Rocky!! In fact, get up and run away!) Here's where it all kicks off, here's where we get the sequel, and here's the finale where Mr T gets punched in the face repeatedly. Sorry, I'll stop now.
* Phishing Messages on XBox Live Network - Game nerds attacked in horrible fashion. Oh noes!
* An Aw3s0me Offer - Clearly, the name they gave their website was supposed to be the exact opposite of what it actually turned out to be.
* One for the Skype Blocklist - Just like the title says, avoid this DEVIL WOMAN who will smite thee with nudity!
* CNN Daily Top 10 Videos Spam - If you want some crappy fake antivirus programs installed on your PC, look no further!
* 419 Mail Targets Musicians - Well, I can't call it Spear Phishing because it's not a phish, but Spear 419'ing sounds stupid. Help me out here, people!
Well, check out the comments section. In general, when someone shows up on a site and starts posting so defensively with regards something you take issue with, you can usually bet good money on there being something in it for the person posting. Maybe they're related to the site, maybe they're a user, maybe they like the flashing banners and things that go boing. But I've been doing this long enough to know when someone is trying it on (remember Benny Bananas)?
Also, using distinctive slang phrases (easily Googled) can sometimes come back to bite you on the ass.
New worms that attack social networking sites Facebook and MySpace have been uncovered.
Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.a. and Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.b, attack MySpace and Facebook respectively, say security firm Kaspersky Lab, which found the threats.
The worms are designed to upload malicious modules with other functionality via the web. It's likely that they will turn target machines into zombie computers to form botnets.
More here. I haven't seen this in action yet, but the way it spreads (by simply accessing your account) is kind of intriguing, isn't it? Reminds me of some of the more advanced Myspace autospamming tools that the professional spammers have been toying with for a while.
Guess this is another reason to not bother opening up social networking websites for a while. Hopefully Myspace and Facebook will take action to sort this out quickly, but anything involving 2.0 and security usually means a lot of sitting on hands so who knows.
To be honest, I'm more worried by this:
Headlines such as “Paris Hilton Tosses Dwarf On The Street” and “Examiners Caught Downloading Grades From The Internet” are typically used to encourage users to click on a bogus video link that tells them to download a so-called new version Flash Player that is a disguise for codesetup.exe, which installs malware.
Infections that exploit social networking sites - and most other sites out there, come to think of it - will only begin to slowly die away when people are educated enough NOT to click on links proclaiming that Paris is now into hurling dwarves, exciting as that might sound. For now, it just gives more ammo to the "Click on something as stupid as that and you deserve" it argument.
I could ramble on about Mylol for pages and pages, but let's face it - there's no need to. We all know it is one gigantic train-wreck of biblical proportions.
I still don't know who could come up with the idea of a "teen dating site" without immediately thinking this might be the worst idea ever, but oh well. I've already drilled down into the site previously, so this time round let's go with some general observations. Checking the email account I used to sign up, I can see I've become pretty popular in my absence:
Can you guess what kind of content is in every single message I opened up? No prizes, but...
Well fancy that, hot chicks from Africa wanting to be my wife. Roll up, roll up kids, it's time to get scammed! If you try and register on the site, it won't let you if you're under 13:
However, you can still go trawling through the profiles and go hunting for 13 year old girls, a good slice of which have pictures and personal info readily available like phone numbers or whatever:
Yeah, 3000+ of them! 3000+ slices of hot teeny action to get all excited about! Woo! Hooray for creepy old guys with stunningly easy access to teenage kids handing out their phone numbers and names left, right and center! I cannot believe the ability to search for 13 year old kids on this digital trainwreck has NOT been switched off.
Then again, their terms of service are completely nonsensical anyway. Here's a random example of "stuff not to do":
(h) provides material that exploits people under the age of 18 in a sexual or violent manner, or solicits personal information from anyone under 18;
Lol wut
How are they supposed to prevent anyone soliciting personal information from anyone under 18 when they offer membership to anyone 13 years of age or older in the first place?
Trawling through the profiles themselves is an exercise in extreme creepiness. Apart from the weird-assed pics of young girls posing in their underwear, you keep seeing exchanges like the following. It starts off (sort of) innocently enough, but see if you can spot where it all goes horribly wrong:
...ick. Anyway, here's a comment left on her page:
....actually, it's probably a really good thing she's not in the UK. Why?
Oh, perhaps because Davy Boy is TWENTY YEARS OLD AND TELLS 13 YEAR OLDS THEY LOOK SEXY. Do I hear the Party Van rolling in to town?
Jeez. If ever there was a time I would pray to God and ask him to bless me with the ability to punch people in the face over a standard TCP/IP Protocol, now would be it. Don't even get me started on this guy, who claims to be a sexy 14 year old boy looking for a 13 to 18(!) year old girl to text and meet. Fourteen? This guy is never, ever fourteen, is he? Incidentally, his Mylol profile (which I'm not linking to) has someone on his friends list who looks like an extremely young girl in some kind of underwear / hotpants setup posing for the camera. It is, as you might have guessed, extremely freaking creepy.
/ Edit - publishing a newer entry appears to have screwed up this post, I think I got most of it back though.
Slow news day? Let's jumble up some junk and roll it out, people!
Click this, then read this, then wonder wtf the news station is actually going on about. I'm all for safe gaming for kids, but I'm pretty sure someone was having a slow news day over at Local 6 when they threw that thing together. Maybe they used the David Bowie method and pulled out segments of "think of the children" type articles and random and stitched them together.
Journalist: Okay, we got paedophiles, a web cam, ooh ooh! We'll randomly name Grand Theft Auto and Halo 3 for no real reason whatsoever, then mention some vague stuff about giving people "gamer points" with no indication of how that actually works in practice. Sales gold!
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