BiggAndyy the Magazine

A very nice and very usable search engine that caters to the numismatic community.

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Give it a try, I think you will be very pleased with COINS2.COM.

In today’s report from Breitbart (linked to by Drudge) and in support of our previous discussion of Social Engineering Worms and Virii, there is a reported increase of “real time” worm infections from emails with titles like “Fidel Castro Dead” or “Hugo Chavez Dead”.

Whether or not this is the same strain of worm that has been dubbed “Storm Worm”, the pattern is clear. Current events are the newest horse the spammers and root kit worms are riding into your inbox and your System32 directory.

Happy99.exe and Melissa from the days of yore have revisited us again. Apparently we have not learned our lessons, or maybe just forgot them. But I suppose that this unending cavalcade of spam and worms will continue until the basic problem is corrected, the inherent shortcomings of the SMTP protocol, especially with regards to security and sender authentication.

Open Relays are no longer the problem they once were. Not because so many administrators put restrictions on open relaying but because the reason for exploiting an open relay is no longer a major hurdle to spammer and worm coders. Cheap broadband connections can allow a spammer to send nearly 1 million 5k emails from his computer in a day. But not content with that, the bot farms now in place send many magnitudes more junk per day.

For some more basic information see this brief but very informative treatment of the problem by Joseph Terrell at Rockriver.net.

From Reuters

The social engineering of virus writers took another twist with the release of the “Storm Worm”.

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Computer virus writers started to use raging European storms on Friday to attack thousands of computers in an unusual real-time assault, head of research at Finnish data security firm F-Secure (FSC1V.HE: Quote, Profile , Research) told Reuters.

The virus, which the company named “Storm Worm” is sent to hundreds of thousands of email addresses globally, with the e-mail’s subject line saying “230 dead as storm batters Europe.”

The attached file contains the so-called malware that can infiltrate computer systems.

“What makes this exceptional is the timely nature of the attack,” Mikko Hypponen, head of research at F-Secure said.

Hypponen said thousands of computers around the world, most in private use, had been affected.

He said most users would not notice the malware, or trojan, which creates a back door to the computer that can be exploited later to steal data or to use the computer to post spam.

This is a closed loop now. Thousands of compromised machines (bot farms) are sending emails with “real time” social engineering to thousands of other machines to recruit them into the bot farm. Then those machines compromised will be used in the next “real time” attack.

We security minded propellerheads were thinking things were quiet they were not. The bot farms were being quietly harvested by the spammers and hackerz until a super saturation point was reached. Now there are so many that it is probably nigh impossible to eliminate them all from the scene.

We are one small step closer to the collective consciousness of the internet?

In 2001 Microsoft, in co-operation with Compaq, Dell, HP, and Intel, published a paper “Network PC System Design Guidelines“. This was not the birth of the Network Computer but it was the point where the NC enjoyed its biggest audience. People like Larry Ellison and other tech heavy hitters were falling all over themselves to be the first to predict the Rise of the NC.

The idea was sound but the behemoths that were jockeying to position themselves to be first to bring the product to market doomed the NC project to failure everywhere it was tried. Something like the “diskless workstation” would have to wait for a new set of paradigms to be in place.

In the decade since the first fledgling thoughts of a network computer were dreamed up those paradigms have shifted. Microsoft, while still an 800 pound gorilla, no longer enjoys the solitude of being the only viable player on the market. Linux has taken a chunk of the OS market. Apache has taken a bite of the web serving market. Open Source has, for a great degree, become mainstream.

Prices have plummeted and availability has skyrocketed for network bandwidth, memory capacity, network connectivity, and software flexibility. The confluence of improved technology, technology that was unavailable 10 years ago (USB storage devices of the gigabyte capacity), and a large segment of the general public actually capable of utilizing this technology, has brought the Network Computer back to the forefront of industry leaders.

No longer a bleeding edge concept, the NC of today is small, sleek, modern, expandable, and affordable. The Linutop appears to hold the best promise of straddling the bull market of NC demand just at the right time. A Network Computer makes good sense where the tremendous processing power of today’s dual core architecture is overkill when all is needed is internet connectivity.