Richtig said Fred!

It seems a virus writer managed to created a multi platform virus that is cross compatible with BOTH Linux executable format (ELF) and Windows .EXE format… It is indeed an incredible feat, done 100% in assembly. According to Computerworld this virus was written as a proof of concept and is not very dangerous. But then again, I do recall that the first few computer viruses were pretty much all proof of concepts… ….then they evolved and became freed of physical media because if the Internet. All that is missing right now is a multi-platform-code-generating-toolkit, my bet is that someone is already working on that…

You can read Computerworld’s article about this virus.

According to an article published by CNet’s News.Com the FBI reported that Computer Crime costs american businesses 67 Billion $ per year. Wow that is a lot of money, but let’s put all that money in perspective, it would seem businesses spend 25 Billion $ on virus related incidents, but since there is about 300 million americans that is about 83$ per year per american.

Ok let’s just pause for a second and introduce more numbers, according to a research done by Wintergreen Research (numbers not confirmed), the Antivirus “Markets at $2.6 billion in 2003 are expected to reach $9.4 billion by 2009.

OK someone here is lying to us, let’s try to figure this out. If you have a company of about a thousand you can purchase from Symantec a complete antivirus package for about 10-20$ per user, that represents say 6 billion $ per year (at 20$ per user) for 300 million americans… …with this in mind Wintergreen Research’s number seem quite realistic but who did the math at the FBI? And that 67 billion $, that is about 233$ per american per year for computer crime protection…

Ahem, more math geniuses working for the FBI and I quote “the FBI believes its estimate is the most accurate because of the large number of respondents”. They should have checked those numbers and the funniest part is they say “These figures do not include much of the staff, technology, time and software employed to prevent security incidents”, so what exactly costs more than software, technology and time combined ? I guess the FBI likes to use FUD marketing techniques like everyone else.

You can read CNet’s News.com article here

Whew, this blog does not even have 24 hours of existence and it has been slammed by 12 comments from a Troll promoting his online casino.

Spammers and Trolls are usually very shy and rarely give out their real e-mail address, they don’t want to receive SPAM after all. So in order to weed out the bad comments one can simply ask the person doing the comment to validate his own opinion by clicking a link sent to their e-mail address, it is simple yet effective.

Another technique that spammers use are BOTs or BOTnets, these are programs put on victims’ computers without the user’s knowledge much like Spyware, Viruses and Trojans. These programs carry on the spamming on behalf of the spammer. If you want to be protected against a Flood of SPAM comments another method is used, the Captcha (a visual password that makes it easy for humans to pass the test and hard for computers to decipher).

The page for the Comment Authorization Plugin for Wordpress is here
To download the Comment Authorization Plugin click here
The page for the Comment Captcha Plugin for Wordpress is here
To download the Comment Captcha Plugin click here

There are 2 local initiatives to strenghten the security in the USA that made it in the news today. The first one is about a system to track students with RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, which Walmart is also implementing to replace the obvious UPC (the barcodes you see everywhere). So, students are not only numbers after all, they are also “blips” on someone’s RADAR. The second news is about Chicago opening an operation center with some 2000 cameras and microphones spread throughout the city. Those 2 ideas were pushed forward to protect against Terrorism, Kidnapping and Violence but the power they concentrate into an operation center send chills down my spine and reminds me of 1984.

The first story about student tags is here.
The second story about the camera network in Chicago is here