Dragan on Security

Read this interview and you probably will be scared. It is interview with Matt Knox. He talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue.

He says:

It would have been fairly trivial for me to go spelunking for people’s credit card information or whatever. I had four million nodes. I could have done it without anybody at the company even noticing.

and:

Eventually, instead of writing individual executables every time a worm came out, I would just write some Scheme code, put that up on the server, and then immediately all sorts of things would go dark. It amounted to a distributed code war on a 4-10 million-node network.

Question is: Who owns “your” computer?

Thanks to Aleck for pointing me to this scary interview.

Interesting interview: Safe, But Also Sorry: Security expert Bruce Schneier talks about privacy and property in the information state – Reason Magazine.

Citation:

Reason: In Schneier on Security, you emphasize that technology isn’t the only (or even the most important part) of a security solution. Why do people tend to systematically discount cultural and economic factors in considering questions of security?

Schneier: We live in a technological world, and it’s common for us to believe that technology can solve our security problems. It solves so many of our other problems, so it’s a plausible belief. It’s also easier to believe that a shiny new piece of technology—a new ID card, a new airport scanner, a new face-recognition system—can solve our problems than boring old concepts like culture and economics. Admitting that technology isn’t the answer is admitting that there isn’t an answer that will solve the problem, and many people can’t do that yet. We’ve forgotten that risk is an inherent part of life.

PDFCreator is a free tool to create PDF files from nearly any Windows application. Real PDFCreator Web site is: http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator. I have been using it for quite some time (as per trusted friend recomendation) and it is really good tool. Easy to use and pretty fast, it satisfies most of my needs regarding creating PDF files i.e. printing to PDF from various programs which I use.

But there are some impostors on the Internet. Wikipedia article about PDFCreator says:

PDFCreator’s popularity, achieved through word of mouth advertising, has motivated other commercial software vendors to try to fool people who are looking for the free software PDFCreator to purchase their own commercial software version instead, by using a similarly spelled name to “PDFCreator”.

Such attempts include Capsoft’s USD$57.95 PDF Creator and WCCL’s USD$24.95 PDF-Creator.

I will not put that links here as I don’t want to give them any additional PR, but names of domains are carefully chosen so you can easily be mistaken. Actually, this may be considered as kind of scam and phishing. Not exactly according to classic definition of phishing scam but using some of its principles.

I was tricked by CapSoft recently. It’s funny how it happened. New computer required many things to be installed and set up. As I didn’t have the appropriate PDFCreator version saved on my disc, I did brief research on the Internet, I found it (I thought it was appropriate one), and downloaded it, and… Previously, I spent a lot of time installing, transferring data from old machine, setting up, and I was pretty tired. In those circumstances, I missed to check if that version and the PDF website, which I easily googled, was the appropriate one. I spotted that Web site looks a strange, but I thought they changed it since previous time I downloaded PDFCreator. They required e-mail address to send link for download, what was first bad sign. Link, which I received on e-mail, lead to download.com Web site, using redirection over some aweber.com domain. Unfortunately, I wasn’t to carefull, downloaded, installed that PDF Creator and started to use it. Soon, I got e-mail from them. Erhm… I can’t remember that for “old version” (actually right one), I was ever asked for my e-mail address neither I received any mails from them.  And I received more mails, almost every 2-3 days one new mail. Needless to say that user interface is different, behavior is slightly different but I persuaded myself that it is because of newer version.

Suddenly, 14 days after installation it stopped to work as trial period passed and tool offered “Buy now” in message. I hit it and fortunately that button didn’t work somehow. Then, I inspected carefully information on CapsSoft and their version of PDF Creator and found out many complaints on net and also Wikipedia article which I cited above. McAfee Site Advisor also has got discussion about this. After this I inspected my machine for viruses, spyware, rootkits. I still have to check more thoroughly is there any malicious code that I might have got by installing wrong PDF Creator (with space between PDF and Creator in difference to PDFCreator without that space). Just to note that also, their wrong web site has www-pdfcreator in its domain name what is intentionally chosen to trick people. There is no “About us” section on their Web site, neither any phone that you can call nor physical address, apart from PO Box. Etc… etc… It looks like very suspicious company.

My advice is to be careful, very careful when downloading open source software, as many impostors use well known names and its variations to trick people and then to take money. 

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Recent poll with question “Will crisis in financial sector affect tech and security?” expired.

New question is related to long lasting rumors that some security software companies are connected to virus writers and use them as helpers to increase revenues. In my opinion, it is unlikely to believe in, but I would like you to say your opinion in poll on this blog.

So, question is: “Are software companies, which produce antivirus tools, connected to virus writers?”

Two simple answers are yes or no.

Thank you for your vote.

Microsoft Press is celebrating 25 years and gives free book “Writing Secure Code for Windows Vista” by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc. You can download book in PDF format here.

They say:

For 25 years, Microsoft Press books have focused on helping you take your skills and knowledge to the next level. Celebrate our 25th Anniversary with a “Free E-Book of the Month” offer! Simply sign up for the Microsoft Press Book Connection Newsletter for notification of offers, register, and download the selection of the month.