eBay Auction Tool Web Site Infected With Malware
February 23, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Internet Security, Top Stories
A Trojan horse lurking on servers belonging to Auctiva.com, a Web site offering eBay auction tools, infected people’s PCs last week.
The problem became very public when Google’s malware warning system kicked in as people tried to browse the site, saying Auctiva was infected with malware. Google will display an interstitial page warning people of certain Web sites known to contain malware.
“It appears the reason these virus alert warnings started showing up on our site is because some of our machines were injected with malware originating in China,” according to a post on Auctiva’s community forum. “The malware we believe to be at fault has also hit a number of other high-profile Websites over the past six months.”
Google Sinks Atlantis Discovery Buzz
February 23, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Top Stories
Last week, a British man announced he’d found the lost city of Atlantis using Google Ocean — the latest add-on to Google Earth that features 3D bathymetry, which lets you explore the ocean floor. The supposed ‘Atlantis’ image is about 620 miles off the northwestern coast of Africa and south of Portugal. It shows a rectangular grid with what looks like roadways leading away from it at the coordinates 31 15’15.53N 24 15’30.53W. According to The Telegraph, the newspaper that first reported the “discovery,” the pattern is roughly the size of Wales (around 8,000 sq. mi.).
Friday’s find sparked intense interest online despite the farfetched claim. Many scratched their heads wondering, what if? After all, this underwater discovery seemed to match the location Plato had described in his writings. Plato said Atlantis was a massive island that was “larger than Libya and Asia together,” and located at a “distant point in the Atlantic Ocean…in front of the mouth of the pillars of Hercules” (the Straits of Gibraltar).
Kate Winslet hit in Facebook phoneys war
February 21, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Internet Scams
THE final straw was Kate Winslet calling Angelina Jolie, her fellow Oscar nominee, a “fat-lipped crazy cow”. That was when the monitors employed by Facebook, the social networking website, abruptly closed her account.
The real Winslet would have known nothing of the insult. Instead, the British actress had become the latest victim of the trend known as “Fakebooking”. In the past few days, as bookmakers reduced the odds against her taking home the best actress statuette at tonight’s Academy Awards in Los Angeles, Winslet has received the unwelcome accolade of having the most sites devoted to her by internet pranksters.
Google Earth reveals secret history of US base in Pakistan
February 20, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Top Stories
The US was secretly flying unmanned drones from the Shamsi airbase in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Baluchistan as early as 2006, according to an image of the base from Google Earth.
The image — that is no longer on the site but which was obtained by The News, Pakistan’s English language daily newspaper — shows what appear to be three Predator drones outside a hangar at the end of the runway. The Times also obtained a copy of the image, whose co-ordinates confirm that it is the Shamsi airfield, also known as Bandari, about 200 miles southwest of the Pakistani city of Quetta.
Pentagon bans Google map-makers
February 19, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Internet Security
The US defence department has banned the giant internet search engine Google from filming inside and making detailed studies of US military bases.
Close-up, ground-level imagery of US military sites posed a “potential threat” to security, it said.
The move follows the discovery of images of the Fort Sam Houston army base in Texas on Google Maps.
A Google spokesman said that where the US military had expressed concerns, images had been removed.
Sourcetool says Google violated U.S. antitrust laws
February 18, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Search Engines
TradeComet.com, which owns the search engine SourceTool.com, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google Inc on Tuesday, accusing it of engaging in illegal predatory conduct to drive them out of business.
“TradeComet was forced to file the lawsuit when Google refused to stop engaging in predatory conduct to block search traffic by imposing massive, unjustified price increases,” the company said in a statement.
Hong Kong woman’s airport hysterics an online hit
A Chinese woman who freaked out at Hong Kong’s international airport after missing her flight has hit the big time on YouTube after her hysterics were filmed and uploaded to the video sharing website.
The middle-aged woman was seen charging at a security guard at the departure gate, before screaming “aieyyahhhhh,” at the top of her lungs in a rant that lasts about three minutes.
The woman, sprawled on the ground, was seen wailing. An elderly man traveling with her tried to pull her to her feet but she shouted in Cantonese: “I want to go, I want to go.”
The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay is a Swedish website that indexes and tracks BitTorrent (.torrent) files. It bills itself as “the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” and is ranked as the 109th most popular website by Alexa Internet. The website is primarily funded with advertisements shown next to torrent listings. Initially established in November 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau), it has been operating as a separate organization since October 2004. The website is currently run by Gottfrid Svartholm (anakata), Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) and Peter Sunde (brokep).
Pirate Bay Trial Gets Massive Online Coverage
February 17, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Top Stories
The eyes of the file-sharing community remained on Sweden on Tuesday as the trial of four men from The Pirate Bay continued in Stockholm.
The men are charged with copyright-related violations in connection with The Pirate Bay, a Web site that lets users search for torrents, or small information files that coordinate the download of content via the BitTorrent P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing protocol.
Hackers Target Patched Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Vulnerability
February 17, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Internet Security, Top Stories
According to security firm Trend Micro, cyber-criminals are targeting a patched flaw in IE 7 to steal data. A fix for the flaw was included in the recent round of Patch Tuesday security bulletins.
Hackers have begun actively targeting a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 7 that was patched earlier this month by Microsoft.
The bug cyber-criminals are looking to exploit is a remote code execution vulnerability that lies in the way Internet Explorer 7 handles errors when attempting to access deleted objects. According to Trend Micro, attackers are spamming a malicious .DOC file detected as X M L_DLOADR.A in a bid to infect unprotected users.
