MalwareTeks Blog

Scotty is the little dog that appears in your System Tray when running WinPatrol 2007. WinPatrol from BillP Studios is one of those applications that I would classify as a must have for any security conscious Windows user.

After recently reading Bill’s post at Bits from Bill: Vista Won’t Silence Scotty’s Bark, I thought, not for the first time, wow the things that tightening the security in Windows broke. And, of course I wasn’t the least bit surprised by the hoops Bill had to go through with Microsoft to get to the bottom of the issue.

Well the issue will be fixed in the forth coming release of WinPatrol 2007 v12 and a few other surprise features are forth coming according to BillP.

Nice job Bill and looking forward to the release of WinPatrol 2007 v12.

What are the chances that someone looking for WinRAR will type the following into the bowser address bar: http://www.winrar.com (link deactivated)? Probably millions have done this at one time, the official site is http://www.rarlab.com/.

Anyone going to http://www.winrar.com will be redirected to a French site, when they try to click on the “Free Software Downloads” button. There are 11 copies of WinRAR on this site and all 11 are infected with TROJ_STARTPA.QC.

SOURCE: TrendLabs Malware Blog: A WinRAR-lose situation.

Straight from TomCoyote.org

Merijn, the creator of HijackThis ™ recently sold the popular application used to remove malware to Trend Micro™. In addition to improvements like support for Windows Vista™, they’ve added a deceptively titled “AnalyzeThis” button. While the average user likely thinks the AnalyzeThis button provides helpful information for diagnosing their log.

That is certainly interesting.

MalwareTeks is still considering the use of HijackThis v2 from Trend Micro. As Blair points out in his article it is somewhat necessary for Vista users as HijackThis v1.99.1 doesn’t support Vista.

Yes, there are alternatives to HijackThis and we are consider these programs in lieu of HijackThis.

Skimming through the headlines on The Register this one caught my attention: VXers publish blog poisoning tool.

In the past spamvertising tools required some level of human interaction when apply character recognition to CAPTCHA images during the registration process at websites utilizing this anti-spambot measure. With the release of Xrumer 3, human interaction with the OCR aspect of the program isn’t necessary, as the video from PandaLabs shows.

PandaLabs Blog complete write-up on XRumer.