I Love The Web

Virus writers are Social Engineers too

Aug 26, 2008 malware

I have always thought that virus/worm writers are social outcasts who write malicious software to show off their skills to other social outcasts writing even worse variations in a war to dominate the pc zombie space. It turns out that these people are smarter than that. They use ever so cunning social engineering tricks to spread their wares to unsuspecting computer users.

Now i am a fairly experienced computer user, well, at least i thought so, but even I almost fell victim to yet another of their tricks ! Here I was in my inbox receiving a message from people purpoting to be a monitoring agency having picked up my downloading activity of copyrighted material. My first reaction was one of anxiety and I almost double clicked on the attachement until i realised it was a zipped file !

To me that was a give away that it may be a worm.

In the past they target fello geeks with file attachments whose file names resemble serail key generators to popular games and passwords to adult rated websites.

Another example of this practice is reported on the antivirus website, Sophos, where ‘Hackers claim to have kidnapped babies in attempt to infect computers‘

I guess it makes sense.  In mass media, if you want your message to reach as many people as possible, then you adjust your content accordingly.

Tags: malware

error 5 opening registry FrontPage 98

Aug 25, 2008 Uncategorized

For what ever reason you may find yourself, still running Microsoft Frontpage 98 and still running NT and after a decade (yes, 11 years) of faithful service you find yourself having to fix the error above; here is a solution…

• Run NT service pack 6 again, good luck finding that on the web

What you really should be doing is

• migrate to Sharepoint service and windows server 2003 or

• migrate to Linux and run a web content management system

I found references to setting permissions in the registry key that did not make much sense to me but if those did infact help you out, oh well Bob’s your uncle then.