Clipboard Hack Problem

It is true, text you last copied for pasting (copy & paste) can be stolen when you visit web sites using a combination of JavaScript and ASP (or PHP, or CGI) to write your possible sensitive data to a database on another server. Hopefully you haven't copied a credit card number recently before surfing!


To avoid Clipboard Hack Problem, do the following:

1. Go to internet options->security
2. Press custom level
3. In the security settings, select disable under Allow paste operations through
script.

Now the contents of your clipboard are safe :)

Are free services really free ?

We are using in the e-mail service and search engines everyday in our life, but have you ever thought how the service providers survive giving most of the services for free and some may wonder after providing all these services for free how can YAHOO,GOOGLE and others earn in hundreds of millions. Many of my friends don't know how these search engines and free e-mail providers will make millions of money every year.Everyone is curious to know about this, so I'm posting this article to make my friends understand the money making techniques of these free service providers.

You might heard of the story in last month that AOL-America On Line accidentally published the details of millions of keyword searches that 650,000 of its subscribers had carried out over a period of three month. The data revealed many people's online lives in remarkable detail.This is a general problem with free services, you have the impression that you are not paying for this but instead unknowingly you are paying a reasonably heavy price.

Search engines have a good reason for gathering data about what people look for.They use this data for sending advertisements to the subscribers of their services. Have you ever noticed that if you view a website based on selling products online, you will get mails [most times as spams] from them at regular times even though you have not subscribed to that website, this is possible because the search engine servers store your computer IP address and the product you looked out in that website. These advertisers pay the search engines and also the free e-mail providing companies a certain amount to hold the data of their website visitor. Also if they sell one product through advertisement then they will pay certain amount to free mail or search engine providers.Thus Google,Yahoo,AOL and others are making money by publicizing the private data of the net user.

There is one way that you can avoid your private data on net from publicizing.Google has launched a web history services that lets people to browse and edit the list of sites they visited in the past.Google users can opt this service but opting out of others can be tricky. It is possible to remove cookies, small text files, on a computer that sites used to remember.

Now think, are free services really free !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Know about Spam

Many of us receive anonymous e-mails in our Inbox. Some of them are filtered by spam busters provided by websites like Google and Yahoo to avoid spams but its not been able to completely eliminate spam mails from loading our mail space. Here is a small note i wrote on spams.....

What is Spam?

Generally, spam means unsolicited and bulk e-mail message. It is unsolicited, because the recipient did not ask for the mail so the sender didn't have verifiable permission to send it. It is bulk, because similar mails are sent to several recipients. To classify a mail as spam, it must be unsolicited and bulked. There are normal bulk mails, for example applications for a job, business solicitations, etc. There are normal unsolicited mails as well, for example newsletters, discussion lists, etc. Only those mails can be classified as spams that are unsolicited and bulk at the same time.

To determine what spam means is a really difficult task so the above-mentioned definition is not a perfect one. The biggest problem is not that the mails are unsolicited or bulk, but the fact that every e-mail not being requested, unsolicited or bulk is more expensive for the recipient than the sender in terms of money and resources.

Based on the above, the following attributes can be said about spam:

• The recipient person is not important because the message has been sent to many users without change.
  
• The recipient didn't allow a verifiable way, prudently and definitely the sending of the mail.
  
• Sending and receiving spam mails result in unequal benefit to the sender.
  

Increasing problem...

Nowadays, besides viruses, spam is the most important question of the Internet. Several solutions have been made against them (regulations, spam filter softwares), but unfortunately there are no techniques, applications that can provide 100% protection at the moment. In spite of this the attack against them is going on, the content filtering applications are on the top of the security software market.

Why is it harmful?

The main damage is the waste of time spent on "handling" spam messages: recognizing, selecting, reading and/or deleting of spam mails. This could be a real problem for example in a workplace.

Moreover the "superfluous" loading of the network or mail servers is also an important question regarding processing and storage capacity.

On the user side, relevant information could be lost among the spam mails arriving in large numbers. Not to mention the deterioration of the e-mail address which becomes unusable because of being loaded by spams.

Recently, as you can see, viruses and unsolicited mail have been intertwined so some spam mail can deliver viruses as well.

Online Banking sytsem fails !!!!!!!!

When I heard the news that crisis-hit Northern Rock's website had crashed last Friday under the weight of numbers of online savers trying to withdraw their money, I immediately thought, "Thank goodness I am not the IT director of Northern Rock today."

Banks like Northern Rock spend millions of dollars a year on their internet banking systems. They will have servers with configuration of latest cutting edge technology, to do the hard work and several experts to look after them.

Probable Solutions :

Firstly, a bank such as Northern Rock can make sure it has enough computer servers on standby, ready to swing in to action if the need arises. This can be very expensive, because for 99.9% of the time, the bank will have large numbers of servers will be idle.
However, a bank can make an arrangement with an IT company to provide the extra capacity to handle the traffic "on demand".

Secondly, a bank can put in a throttle of some sort to slow down the number of customers hitting the system second by second. The website will get slower and slower but will not crash suddenly in a overload situation on its servers. Typically, when it gets frustratingly slow, customers are automatically diverted to another temporary website which will take their contact details, perhaps their instructions, and get back to them as soon as possible.

However, some banks are focused onefficient operation and cost control above all else. They may take the view that the risk to their reputation is outweighed by the financial benefit of saving money by not putting in place contingency plans for these rare and more extreme occasions.

One of the root problems in many banks is that the business people who run the bank do not understand computers. They only understand the profits and gains in buying and selling so they end up in buying computers for cheap rate, they even don't think about the configuration of such computers and this online traffic handling is like Hebrew script for them.

I heard that there are bankers in the UK today who even get their secretary to print out all their e-mails and put them in a folder every morning! But in the age of the internet, that is completely unacceptable. Meanwhile, the IT pals don't know how to explain what they do or, more importantly, what risks are being taken as a result of the IT decisions being made.

On a day like last Friday, the scene in the IT department at Northern Rock would have been frenzied. The bank will have systems that monitor the main online banking system to alert people if there is a problem. There were probably traffic alerting monitors showing exactly what was happening, second by second, like a mission control center. That's where the IT director would have been, pacing up and down, watching developments. The alarm bells would have started ringing long before the website crashed.
It's a race against time to beef up capacity, but unfortunately on this occasion, the customer volumes grew just too quickly - and horror of horrors, the site crashed.



One thing you can be sure of, though - you learn fast in a crisis.

Google Bloggers be Aware

Google's Blogger site is being used by vicious hackers who are posting fake entries to some blogs.

The fake entries contain weblinks that lead to dummy-trapped downloads that could infect a Windows PC.
Infected computers are being hijacked by the gang behind the attacks and either mined for saleable data or used for other attacks. The Blogger attack is the latest in a series by a gang that has managed to hijack hundreds of thousands of PCs.

Attack pattern

These dummy-trapped links turning up on Blogger on 27 August. Now many hundreds of blogs on the site have been updated with a short entry containing the link.

Storm worm subject lines :

• are you kidding me? lol

• Dude dont send that stuff to my home email...

• Dude your gonna get caught, lol

• HAHAHAHAHAHA, man your insane!

• I cant belive you did this

• LMAO, your crazy man

• LOL, dude what are you doing

• man, who filmed this thing?

• oh man your nutz

• OMG, what are you thinking

It is not yet clear how the links were posted to blogs. The bogus entries could have exploited a Blogger feature that lets users e-mail entries to their journal. The blogs themselves could also be fake and set up solely to act as hosts for spam.

The entries on the blogs have the same text as some of the spam distributed by the group behind the attacks. These attempt to trick people into clicking on links and downloading booby-trapped files using cleverly crafted messages. Some can be seen as YouTube links others claim to be looking for testers of software packages or digital greetings cards.

The first attack used a spam that aimed to give recipients more information about the severe storms seen in Europe. This led to the virus used by the gang being dubbed the "Storm Trojan".
Since then group has been sending out huge numbers of different spam messages in a bid to trick people.
The spam messages have been changed to capitalize on news events and the viral payload has been updated many times to fool anti-virus programs. The group can send out so much junk mail because they have hijacked so many Windows PCs via successive campaigns.