Tuesday, March 27, 2012

The Zeus Botnet is under Microsoft Attack

Microsoft has been targeting botnets for some time now, and their latest venture is against the Zeus Botnet. If you don’t know what a botnet is, it is a system of computers or servers that deliver malware to the public. The key, however, is that the computers or servers are highjacked and unknowingly distribute spam and malware to other computers via the Internet. In highjacking, the computer continues to operate in its normal mode, but it becomes a distributer of programs or spam. The owner may not even be aware of this occurring.
Operation b71

The Zeus botnet is just another of the botnets that Microsoft has been pursuing, offering assistance to various law enforcement organizations. In operation b71, the focus is on botnets using Zeus, SpyEye and Ice-IX variants of the Zeus family of malware. It is estimated that the Zeus malware is responsible for nearly half a billion dollars in damages. The focus is not to bring down the botnet, instead it is to boomerang the malware back to the cybercrime organization. In effect, the idea is to cause long-term damage to the cybercriminal organization that relies on these botnets for illicit gain.

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Zeus Botnet

What the Zeus Botnet Does

At the heart of the Zeus malware a program called keylogging, is instituted. This program records a person’s every computer keystroke to monitor online activity and gain access to usernames and passwords in order to steal victims’ identities, withdraw money from their bank accounts and make online purchases. Once a computer is infected with Zeus, the malware automatically starts the keylogging. So when a person types in the name of a financial or e-commerce institution, that information is forwarded back to the cybercriminal and they use it to gain access to people’s online accounts from that point forward.

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Zeus Botnet In Context

To make matters worse, according to a legal complaint filed by Microsoft against the Zeus botnet, this action is more dangerous because the information is sold in the criminal underground as a crime ware kit. This allows criminals to set up their own command and control servers and create their own individual Zeus botnets. These crime ware kits sell for anywhere between $700 to $15,000, depending on the version and features of the kit. The investigation is ongoing with more details to follow.

Source: Microsoft


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Microsoft Connected Home Videos

If you believe companies like Microsoft or Apple, the so called connected home will be the next big thing when it comes to teching-up your living space. Microsoft’s vision puts several Microsoft and Microsoft-partner products on center stage, including the company’s Xbox system with Kinect, Windows Phone and Windows Server.

The first video is a quick walk through Microsoft’s Connected Home in Munich, Germany. This presentation room uses technology that is available today, including Windows 7, Windows Phone or the Xbox 360 with Kinect.

You will see how phone apps control different elements of the room, like the room’s lighting for instance or temperature. There is also a lot of interconnectivity going on, like controlling the Xbox interface with a Windows Phone, or using a Windows 7 Tablet PC to send videos to multiple screens in the home.

Microsoft put a lot of technology into that room to make life easier and more comfortable at the same time. With these technologies becoming more mainstream, prices will go down as well, which will make those solutions more affordable for a larger audience.

The second video looks at the Microsoft Home. This is the vision that Microsoft has of the home of the future. The Home is located on the Redmond campus and only accessible by invitation.

It demonstrates how a home could look like in five, ten or even fifteen years from today on. This for instance includes a watch that is acting has a health reading device that you can place on a specially prepared tablet to transfer the readings to an app that is displaying charts and other information about your health then.

One of the impressive technologies in the house is a program that can detect items and elements on screen when watching videos for instance. This includes shop signs, but also items that people carry around with them like a backpack for instance.

How would you envision the connected home of the future?


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Meet Fu Chunli, The Lucky Winner Of Apple’s 25 Billionth App Download Competition And A $10,000 iTunes Gift Card


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When the iOS App Store was first launched in 2008, not even Apple themselves could have predicted the store’s meteoric rise to become the undisputed heavy-weight champion of the app distribution world. At the beginning of 2011 Apple launched a competition, offering a $10,000 iTunes gift card to the lucky App Store user who downloaded the 10 billionth app from the store. The Cupertino company has since repeated that offering by giving away a gift card of the same value to whoever downloaded the twenty-fifth billionth app.



That competition has been and gone, with the lucky winner being announced as Fu Chunli, a Chinese citizen from the city of Qingdao in the Shandong Province of Eastern China. The contest was open to App Store users from all over the world, but Chunli managed to beat all of the competition by downloading a free copy of the popular Where’s My Water? app. What makes the story even more compelling is that when downloading the app; she actually had no idea about Apple’s competition and was still at the stage of getting used to using the App Store’s interface.



As a competition winner, Apple have presented Fu Chunli with an iTunes gift card worth a whopping $10,000, allowing her to download apps, music, movies and TV programs from across Apple’s range of offered content. To celebrate the victory, Apple invited her to attend a special event at the Beijing Apple Store to collect her prize, view the company’s in-store products and pose for the obligatory press pictures. Apple could have simply posted the gift card to her or credited the amount to her Apple ID but in typical Apple fashion they chose to offer the winner a warm reception and gain some positive exposure in the process which will no doubt put them in good light in one of the world’s emerging markets.



The local media in Qingdao now refer to Fu Chunli as the ‘Apple Girl’, but the story could have been so different considering that she actually believed the original call from Apple was nothing more than a hoax. Even the congratulatory calls from friends and family members wasn’t enough to convince her the competition was genuine, and it wasn’t until she received an email from Apple Inc. then the news eventually began to sink in. The iPhone was responsible for downloading the 25 billionth app is Chunli’s first Apple product, but we are pretty sure it won’t be her last.


(via M.I.C Gadget)


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