TechBlog

Mashable: The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that took down WikiLeaks as the site published secret U.S. embassy cables over the weekend could be the work of a single hacker, working for his own agenda. The hacker, called the Jester (or th3j35t3r), describes himself as a “hacktivist for good” and posts the message “TANGO DOWN” after a successful attack, together with a link of the sites he takes down. The focus of his attacks, the Jester claims in his Twitter Bio, is “obstructing the lines of communication for terrorists, sympathizers, fixers, facilitators, oppressive regimes and other general bad guys.” ...

Mashable: Bing is getting an early start on the “best of 2010” lists, releasing its compilation of the year’s most popular search terms a little more than a month before the New Year. Reality TV star Kim Kardashian tops the list, which is dominated by celebrities; in fact, seven of the top 10 terms are people, as you can see in the list: Kim Kardashian Sandra Bullock Tiger Woods Lady Gaga Barack Obama Hairstyles Kate Gosselin Walmart Justin Bieber free Kardashian’s online dominance extends beyond searches, however. You may recall that a recent study pegged her as the celeb that gets the most traffic to their website via Twitter (despite not having the largest audience). ...

Former U.S. President George W. Bush’s book tour will stop at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto on Monday, with the social networking site announcing a “Facebook Live” event for 5 p.m. ET / 2 p.m. PT. Bush has been making the media rounds over the past several weeks, appearing on The Today Show, Oprah and The Tonight Show among other programs to talk about his memoir “Decision Points.” ...

Sophos Labs: There are two stories that have been the focus of much speculation that have come to some closure today. New information confirming many peoples suspicions about Aurora and Stuxnet have been reported by Wikileaks.org and Reuters. As has been widely reported Wikileaks began releasing over 250,000 previously secret diplomatic cables that it is assumed they received from PFC. Bradley Manning. Most of the cables are as uninteresting as reading your friends Yahoo! mail. ...

You might want to steer clear of the following fake security program, being promoted as a “Windows Trojan Removal Kit” but actually hijacking your PC in the form of the ThinkPoint rogue with a mixed (24/43) detection rate. The file is currently being offered up by your typical “fake security scan” pages, such as microsoftwindowssecurity152(dot)com. Those familiar with this particular rogue will be aware that it tends to stick with domains similar to the one above. ...

CNN – Mashable: Today, users can start connecting with all their favorite social causes in one online sphere, as Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has launched his much-buzzed-about social network, Jumo. Hughes, who left Facebook in 2007 to become the Obama campaign’s director of online organizing, soft-launched Jumo last March. At that time the site existed merely as a homepage featuring a rather intriguing survey box that asked the site visitor an array of questions from, “If you had a daughter tomorrow, which would you name her?” to “Would you say the world is getting better or worse?” ...

Mashable: Controversial whistleblower website WikiLeaks is reporting that it’s under a “mass distributed denial of service attack” just as its much-hyped leak of secret embassy cables has been leaked early on Twitter. According to a tweet from the website’s official Twitter account, WikiLeaks is experiencing a DDoS attack. The reported attackers are not yet known. Several reports state that the website has been experiencing intermittent downtime. We are currently attempting to verify that WikiLeaks is indeed under attack. ...

SophosLab: Once again, a rogue application is spreading virally between Facebook users pretending to offer you a way of seeing who has viewed your profile. As we’ve described a couple of times before, plenty of Facebook users would *love* to know who has been checking them out online.. but unfortunately scammers are aware of this, and use the lure of such functionality as a way to trick you into making bad decisions. ...

Over the last few days, some news organizations have been saying that Stuxnet source code is available on the black market, and that clearly therefor there is an impending Internet Armageddon. This is patently silly, on a number of levels, but silly none-the-less. First thing is that I flat-out don’t believe Stuxnet source is available for sale on the black market or anywhere. Remember how often I say that if something sounds too good to be true, it’s not true? Well, the opposite applies too. If something sounds too bad to be true, it’s not true either. We really don’t know who built Stuxnet, or who the intended target was, be we may rest assured that whoever put that much work into it, isn’t selling it, at any price. It’s actually more probable that some no-honor-among-thieves bad guy is scamming fellow bad guys. “Sure, this is Stuxnet source code. Prove otherwise.” ...

Thomas Wegele, Virus Researcher from Avira wrote: In this month’s ITW malware set from the Wildlist organization two new variants of W32/Ramnit appeared. W32/Ramnit is a Worm spreading via infected executable files and infected HTML Files. It is a quite widespread malware – which is why we decided to dig deeper into it. Upon execution the malware creates a new file in the directory where it was started. This file is named “mgr.exe”. It then gets executed and creates a copy of itself in “C:%ProgramDir%\Microsoft\WaterMark.exe” which also gets executed after creation and in turn infects the EXE, DLL and HTML files found on the system and tries to connect to a server. ...