Tag: WORMS

With jobs being hard to come by these days, you need to get creative in order to land that dream gig. We wouldn't recommend this path to everybody, but Chris Putnam earned a job at Facebook by creating a worm that made users' profiles look like a MySpace page. In 2005, Putnam, along with his friends Marcel Laverdet and Kyle Stoneman, wrote the XSS-based worm, which spread every time an ...

We're sure you're all familiar with Conficker, but that's just one blip in the long and storied history of computer viruses. F-Secure put together a nine-minute video tracing the evolution of viruses from the very first (Brain), to non-destructive joke viruses of the early '90s (Walker), all the way up to the nuclear plant-crippling cyber-weapons (Stuxnet). ...

Share The latest worm to squirm its way around Facebook, like most, lures in its users by taking advantage of a temptation that's become fundamentally human: the 'like' button. The virus hit the social network over the holiday weekend, and, according to Sophos, has already victimized hundreds of thousands of users. Fortunately, though, it's pretty easy to tell which of your friends has fallen ...

Share Whether you own up to it or not, we're all guilty of using Facebook to excavate everyone's dirtiest laundry. While trolling through your friends' list to find out who broke up with who may be guiltily pleasurable, you could also spread an insidious digital worm that feeds on the innate human penchant for gossip. If you've come across any wall posts on Facebook saying something to the ...

Another day, another Twitter worm. The latest worm (or Tworm, if you please) to hit the micro-blogging site is even sneakier and more dangerous than others we've warned you about. That's because it's being spread via direct messages (DM) from users you know, not random spam accounts. Let's keep it simple. If you receive a DM with the link pictured above, don't click on it. Delete the message ...

In the occasional rush to get to the office on time, just about all of us have either illegally driven in the carpool lane or exceeded posted speed limits. Sometimes, you get caught and pay a fine, and sometimes, you get away scot-free. Call it luck and thank the Lord, but drivers in Manchester, England have something else to thank for eluding recent traffic fines -- the Conficker worm. The ...

Twitter keeps on getting hit by phishing traps, scams, and worms. Recently, these attacks have come via links to YouTube videos, fake accounts, and infected tweets. Now, spammers are sending out fake e-mail invitations to join Twitter, according to Symantec's blog. The e-mail, which has been sent to a large number of accounts and can be seen above, looks fairly legit, except for one tell-tale ...

If you thought Conficker was bad, meet Gumblar. If malware programs were comic book villains, Conficker would be Kingpin -- evil for sure, but really just a big bully. Gumblar on the other hand would be Galactus -- massive, all-powerful, evil, and extremely difficult to defeat. ScanSafe, a computer security firm, has been tracking the progress of the worm since its arrival on the scene in March, ...

Spring break is here, and, apparently, Twitter had a little too much fun over the weekend, waking up with a couple of nasty bugs. Thankfully, if the pieces of malware that made the Twitter rounds this weekend were STDs, they would be crabs -- annoying, but curable, and not particularly dangerous. The first attack came Saturday, originating with a couple of accounts specifically created to spread ...

As if the threat of the Conficker hanging over our heads weren't enough, now we've got the second coming of the Storm Worm, called Waledec, to watch out for. Waldec spreads via e-mails claiming to have a Valentine's Day greeting for you. Clicking on the link contained in the message takes you to a page containing dozens of hearts with the message "guess which one is for you? Clicking on any of ...

Remember this nasty worm with multiple-personality disorder we reported on last week? Well, apparently, it is still spreading, and is now responsible for an estimated nine million infected computers! So far it hasn't done anything especially nasty, beyond finding its way onto machines, but that doesn't mean you want it lurking on yours! Security experts at F-Secure believe the piece of malware ...

Everyone likes to race, whether it's cars or skateboards or just people on two feet. Researchers at Microsoft are looking to apply this notion of competition to the world of viruses, with the hope of creating friendly worms to compete against malicious ones. Similar to the current research that use genetically-modified viruses to deliver medication or fight cancer, the "good" computer viruses ...

We love lists -- you should have figured that out by now. This time, PC World came up with 15 tech myths, bursting one bubble at a time. We list a few highlights here. Using third-party ink in your printer voids the warranty Just plain not true. Of course, if the third-party ink damages the printer, then you're out of luck. But simply using third-party ink does not let Epson off the hook if your ...