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Showing posts with the label zombie

Quantum Phishing: email is dead

Phishing has matured. The bad guys are now so adept at mimicking the actual emails sent by PayPal, that PayPal support apparently cannot tell the actual PayPal email apart from the Phishing emails. PayPal mistakes own email for phishing attack [The Register] PayPal admits to Phishing Users [eset.com] I've wondered for years why the phishing emails were often so terribly lame. The ideal strategy would seem to be to read some actual emails from the intended target, and mimmic those as closely as possible. The traditional excuse offered by the security community is that the emails appear often to be generated by people who speak English as a second language, but that doesn't seem like it would be such a limiting factor, given the ease with which the translations could be corrected, even anonymously, using clever internet tricks, even fairly simple ones. The real answer seemed to be that the text content of the email didn't much matter, as people don't read them very ...

Rogue DNS

I haven't seen the original paper, but this article claims that researchers at Google and Georgia Institute of Technology estimate that there are 68,000 rogue DNS servers on the net. Use of Rogue DNS Servers on Rise Rogue DNS is one of the services provided by the zillions of malware, virus, worm, and rootkit infested zombie PC systems on the internet at any given time. The interesting part of this trick is that zombie PC systems might get "cleaned up" after an infestation has been detected, but their DNS configuration might (OK, probably does in nearly every case) remain pointing to a rogue DNS server, which occasionally, but not always, provides fraudulent data back to requesting clients. This is yet another reason why infested PC systems must be re-installed from clean original media whenever possible, in case you didn't have enough reasons already. The paper: Corrupted DNS Resolution Paths: The Rise of a Malicious Resolution Authority David Dagon, Chris Le...