Posts by happygeek

Discount coupons are OK, but consumers consider drive-by location marketing an invasion of privacy. That's the warning message that research across four countries (US, UK, Mexico and India) by ISACA would appear to be flagging loud and clear to retailers wanting to maximise the marketing potential of customers with smartphones.

ISACA, which specialises in helping business get the most value while managing risk related to information and technology, asked more than 4,000 consumers about their holiday season shopping habits and their opinions on privacy. This revealed that shoppers in India and the UK were the most resistant to location-based marketing on smartphones, with more than 70% declaring tactics such as sending unrequested special offer messages when they walk past the store concerned would be considered invasive.

The 2013 ISACA IT Risk/Reward Barometer suggests that receiving a text message from a store as they walk by is almost as invasive for people as if they were to go inside and be greeted by name by the clerk despite never having met them before. In the UK, 69% of consumers said they would, however, be happy to be sent a discount coupon on their mobile device. Indeed, across all four countries surveyed people were generally more receptive to the idea of targeted discount codes by text rather than special offers arriving as they walk by that may not be relevant to them.

Mexicans were the most welcoming to the location-based SMS marketing, with more than …

A Channel 4 News investigation in the UK has revealed that in a 24 hour period just one smartphone made 350,000 requests to 315 different servers and made 30,000 requests to 76 servers when otherwise sitting totally idle for 45 minutes. Oh, and then there was the location data being sent to advertising agencies based overseas, and handset ID data heading to various apps. In fact, the investigation simply reiterated the fact that an average smartphone will send out hundreds of thousands of pieces of information every day, giving away its location and unique identity.

Channel 4 News commissioned IT security outfit MWR InfoSecurity to build a black box recorder, codename 'Data Baby' in order to enable the project to monitor the personal information through a mobile phone belonging to a fictitious young woman living in London with a healthy social media life. Producer Geoff White explains: "On this occasion we wanted to look at how information is sent from mobile phones automatically to a variety of websites. We approached MWR InfoSecurity and asked them to build a data interceptor that would track what the phone was doing and then analyse the results."

The results will probably shock anyone who isn't active in the field of IT security and privacy, although those who are will just be nodding their heads in that knowing way. This isn't new news, as such, rather just confirmation of what we already know. Smartphones cannot but help to …

Yep, LastMitch left DaniWeb last week. We did get an email from him thanking the community for helping him and wishing us well, but as far as we are aware his departure is sadly permanent.

Given the seed post sewn, and the link in the signature, the only crop (or should that be crap?) being fertilized here is spam methinks...

I think Dani has hit the nail on the head, and the entire problem can be summed up in one word: laziness. On both sides, student and teacher!

The popular MacRumors Forums site has confirmed that it was successfully hacked on Monday this week. The vBulletin powered forums fell victim to what it describes as a similar breach that hit the Ubuntu forums earlier in the year. "Our case is quite similar" says MacRumors founder Arnold Kim who continues "with a moderator account being logged into by the hacker who then was able to escalate their privileges with the goals of stealing user login credentials." Unlike the Ubuntu breach, no site defacement appears to have taken place though.

In the case of MacRumors, that means some 860,000 usernames, emails and hashed passwords were potentially compromised. The official advice is to assume that your login is now known and passwords should be changed immediately. Amichai Shulman, CTO of security outfit Imperva, warns other forums that when "you use third party components you expose your network to the threats faced by all those applications, significantly increasing your attack surface." vBulletin was, of course, found to be vulnerable to an exploit that enables an attack to create a secondary admin account and effectively take control of the target site. DaniWeb used to operate on a heavily customised vBulletin platform but replaced this with a totally in-house developed proprietary platform last year.

Here's that MacRumors Forum confirmation in full:

Yesterday, the MacRumors Forums were targeted and hacked in a similar manner to the Ubuntu forums in July. We sincerely apologize for the intrusion, and are still investigating …

Did the FBI get the wrong man, or at least the wrong Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR), when it shut down the Silk Road darknet marketplace? Claims are being made that this is precisely what happened, and that Ross Ulbricht who was arrested took over as acting DPR from the real Silk Road founder before the FBI made its move. In a statement, reposted to Pastebin today under the title of 'Possible truths behind DPR and Silk Road', someone calling themselves Elthemor Sagewood and claiming to be a well known Silk Road vendor says "In a court hearing today, Ulbricht's lawyer claimed that Ross was, in fact, not the real DPR that the FBI was looking for. This only goes too perfectly with something that was posted on an I2P (Invisible Internet Project) eepsite just after Ulbricht's arrest, and is something I personally have been holding onto, afraid of releasing it into the clearnet for the sake of my strict "what happens in the darknet, stays in the darknet" rule, and how it would affect the case."

Whatever the truth of the matter, Silk Road has emerged in a 2.0 format with a welcome notice entitled 'we rise again' and signed off by Dread Pirate Roberts. Accessed in exactly the same way as the original Silk Road, using a Tor-connected browser and a URL (which goes nowhere unless that Tor connection is used) that is already readily available for those who want to look for …

It has been officially confirmed that the php.net website of the open-source PHP programming language has been hacked and infected with malware. The successful breach of the site came to light yesterday morning when the Google Safe Browsing service started flagging php.net as serving up malicious scripts. This was, at first, denied by php.net which Tweeted claims that it was down to a false negative by Google. However, that position has changed and now it has been officially confirmed that two servers at php.net had been hacked and were, indeed, hosting malicious code in order to install malware on the computers of unsuspecting visitors.

It would appear that the breach occurred on Tuesday, and the infection window was open through until Thursday morning when spotted by Google. The site has now been relocated to a clean set of servers, and there is absolutely no suggestion that any of the PHP code itself has been compromised in any way so developers can breathe a sigh of relied there at least. If you have visited the php.net site during that attack window period though, it might be a good idea to double-check that your systems have not been infected.

It seems that the breach itself was surprisingly straightforward in approach, rather old-school in fact, with the use of an iFrame injection technique pointing to the Magnitude exploit kit and ultimately dropping a Trojan known as Tepfer onto the visiting computer. Up to date AV scanners …

From the Daniweb Digest newsletter this month:

We are very pleased to announce the winners of the API competition which was launched earlier in the year to help raise awareness of the new and very robust DaniWeb API available to developers.

Because both Coreyavis and Pritaeas came up with equally amazing finished products, we decided to make them joint winners and split the $300 Amazon Gift Voucher prize between them so they will be getting a $150 voucher each.

Coreyavis developed the excellent DaniWeb Birthdays app, a calendar that displays the birthdays of DaniWeb members! He tells us that future planned features for the app include the ability to add your birthday to the calendar if it's not included, to remove your birthday if you wish to not take part, a full list of members with birthdays on selected day and better search functionality amongst others.

Pritaeas developed a number of API apps including the following: DwArticleWatch which shows the 10 latest articles (which can filtered using a dropdown), DwRssDashboard which provides an overview of the newest five items per (sub)forum and DwWatchedArticles to show your watched articles.

Diafol and riahc3 also both spent a lot of time working with our API, and came up with some great code snippets and frameworks that lay the groundwork for others to build from. So we decided to combine the second ($125) and third ($75) prizes and split this between the two of them to give each of these guys $100 vouchers.

Congratulations …

Oi! :)

I appear to have shaved though...

Oh, and perhaps most importantly in my case, being able to look and dress how I want. This personal freedom is more than just a vanity thing, it's something I care about deeply. I have a tattooed head/neck/hands/fingers for example. I do not own a suit or a collared shirt or a tie let alone wear any of them. What I do is important, and NOT what I look like. Try telling that to most employers. When I first started my business twenty years ago I sported a 36" long red and black dreadlocked mohawk haircut, multiple facial piercings and multiple tattoos even then, oh and was rather 'unconventional' in my fashion choice. I have not changed much, apart from dropping the metal (apart from three ear piercings) adding lots more ink and growing a beard which I now choose to wear in beaded plaits. Do I give a flying **** about what potential clients think? Erm, nope. Sure, I might lose a bit of money, but I gain in the quality of life thing as I don't have the stress of working with shallow bigots.

I fear I may be in an overly ranty mood today. :)

I have had my own business for 20 years now. My earnings have not increased by 10% annually, or even 1% for that matter. Indeed, in real terms, my earnings have dropped by considerably more than 10% over the years. That said, I'm happy running my own business, setting my own working times, determining who I do and do not work with, deciding what I am and am not happy with and, ultimately, it really isn't all about the money as far as I am concerned. Quality of life is much more important, and that is what having my own business gives me.

Absolutely not! DaniWeb is free to use, however it does cost money (a lot of money) to keep it going. That's why we ask members who feel they can help with the costs to maybe make a small donation, but it's not in any way compulsory.

Any idea what happened?

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/80555/Databinding-in-Silverlight-applications

Took me three seconds on Google to find that...

"Our investigation currently indicates that the attackers accessed Adobe customer IDs and encrypted passwords on our systems. We also believe the attackers removed from our systems certain information relating to 2.9 million Adobe customers, including customer names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other information relating to customer orders. At this time, we do not believe the attackers removed decrypted credit or debit card numbers from our systems." These are the words of Brad Arkin, Chief Security Officer at Adobe as he reveals that one of the biggest names in the software business has fallen victim to what can only be described as a massive security breach: passwords and credit card data for nearly three million customers, source code for Adobe products - folks this looks like it was Xmas come early for the hackers.

Adobe has now confirmed that Adobe Acrobat, ColdFusion and ColdFusion Builder were amongst those hit, and 'other products' were also involved although it has yet to state which for some reason. This in itself is very big news, and very unusual as far as security breaches go. We are far more used to hearing of login and password databases being compromised, credit card data stolen etc. Things with an obvious and quick route turning a profit for the cyber criminals. However, stealing the source code for such high profile and widely-used software is something else. Now, it could be that the hackers just stumbled across the code during a successful breach of …

Yo momma is so lame that she suggested starting a yo momma thread on DaniWeb. Oh, hold on a moment...

In my DaniWeb report on the launch of the new iPhone 5s from Apple, I stated that you could "forget the fingerprint scanner built into the new circular home button" but I knew all along that was never going to be the case. In context, I was focusing upon what I think is the most innovative and important feature of the new iPhone; namely the 64bit chip that powers it. Of course the fingerprint scanner is an innovation, in as far as it will now drive other manufacturers to consider implementing biometrics on devices such as smartphones and tablets as a norm rather than an optional exception.

In that same review I also said "even before anyone has tried the Touch ID system the Internet seems to be filling up with people saying it won't work" and implied that the sub-epidermal scanner with a 500 pixel-per-inch resolution was pretty good technology, and along with the locally encrypted fingerprint data (not image) would be a pretty safe additional layer of security for a mobile device such as this. Of course, plenty of people disagree with me and there has been lots of coverage online and in print media regarding cat paw prints unlocking iPhones, toddlers using the finger of a sleeping father and even hacker groups moving into James Bond territory with manufactured fingerprint copies fooling the scanner. Let's dismiss those one by one, starting with the cat: yes it works, if you let your cat register a paw …

See: http://www.daniweb.com/internet-marketing/threads/464093/hummingbird-and-sem#post2020275

See: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/26/google_algo_update/

Though Google declined to discuss the technology underlying the algorithm – a depressing break with the past – it did tell us that Hummingbird "makes results more useful and relevant, especially when you ask Google long, complex questions."

Small groups of what are best described as cyber-mercenaries, willing and able to perform surgically precise hit and run hacking operations, are offering their services for hire out of China, Japan and South Korea. That's the conclusion of security researchers at Kaspersky Lab who have been following the progress of a newly discovered espionage campaign, known as Icefog and targeting the supply chain in South Korea and Japan which feeds companies in the West.

Icefog is an APT, or Advanced Persistent Threat, and in the words of the Kaspersky Lab report a "small yet energetic" one. Although it appears to have started as long ago as 2011, it has only recently hit the radar with an upsurge in size in scope. The 'new' part of the APT equation in this case is the introduction of these cyber-mercenary gangs that are available for hire.

"For the past few years, we’ve seen a number of APTs hitting pretty much all kinds of victims and sectors. In most cases, attackers maintain a foothold in corporate and governmental networks for years, exfiltrating terabytes of sensitive information" says Costin Raiu, Director of Global Research & Analysis at Kaspersky Lab who continues "The hit and run nature of the Icefog attacks demonstrate a new emerging trend: smaller hit-and-run gangs that are going after information with surgical precision. The attack usually lasts for a few days or weeks and after obtaining what they were looking for, the attackers clean up and leave. In …

A survey of more than 700 tablet owners in US, UK and Australia has revealed some interesting insights into how people use their devices. The $195 Gartner 'Consumers Buy Media Tablets Based on Lower Prices and Better Quality, not Brand' report (gotta love that snappy title, huh?) unsurprisingly shows that tablets are being bought for different reasons than they were two years ago. Unsurprising, to me at least, as I would imagine it's pretty obvious that the market has grown so big during this period and the 'late adopters' for want of a better description are likely to have different expectations than early ones. Heck, when my 75 year old technologically indifferent mother-in-law announces that she wants an iPad, you know the market has changed.

So, for example, in the 2011 survey it was brand that mattered most when it came to purchasing a tablet. What you might have called the 'iPad Effect' back then. Fast forward to 2013 and brand has slipped down to number three, behind design and price. What I like to think of as the 'Android Effect'.

When it comes to what people, or at least those who got asked the questions, are doing with their tablets the answers are interesting but, again, not exactly surprising if you consider what your friends and colleagues do with theirs. I was not at all shocked to learn that 50 per cent of 'device screen time' is spent on entertainment. Check people out on the bus, train or plane …

Can you even buy monitors like that any more? :)

So here it is, or will be by the end of the month, the world's first smartphone to use a 64-bit chip. Immediately I would suggest that you can forget about most of what was announced yesterday:

Forget the new colours that everyone is drooling over (gold? really? - grey? really?) which really are just window dressing. Forget the uprated camera which is now an 8-megapixel beast with dual LED multicoloured 'True Tone' flash (which apparently will help to grab images which look more natural) and slow-motion video capability.

Forget the fingerprint scanner built into the new circular home button, if the outrage from privacy campaigners and technology nay-sayers will let you. Even before anyone has tried the Touch ID system the Internet seems to be filling up with people saying it won't work. However, the sub-epidermal scanner is there with a 500 pixel-per-inch resolution and can be used (once set up) to unlock your iPhone 5s by simply touching the home button and scanning your (encrypted) fingerprint. Touch ID will also enable iTunes purchases under iOS 7.

You can even forget iOS 7, the all new, all dancing operating system which has the honour of being the first bit of Apple software to be created by Apple hardware designer Jonathan Ive. Better known for his work on such things at the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad, Ive has given iOS something of an Android-Windows-alike makeover with brighter colours, flatter layers and a new set …

Apart from the somewhat iffy stab at defining networking, did you actually have a question at all?

Truth be told, many security problems are not new - the appearance of the results of bad practise in the wild is cyclical and it seems that the SuperGlobals are in the spotlight again right now.

In the newly published Imperva 'Hacker Intelligence Initiative Report' the in-the-wild modification and exploitation of PHP SuperGlobal variables has been investigated. This particular external variable modification weakness has been described as being where a PHP application does "not properly protect against the modification of variables from external sources, such as query parameters or cookies". Imperva has seen evidence of SuperGlobal variables being used as a launchpad for remote code execution, remote file inclusion and security filter evasions attacks.

The report itself should be something of a must-read for anyone developing PHP applications who wants to get a grip on how these can be manipulated by those exploiting the SuperGlobal parameters. Not least as it would appear that PHP SuperGlobal parameters are gaining an increased popularity within the hacking community courtesy of being able to incorporate multiple security problems into an advanced threat used to break application logic, compromise servers and ultimately result in data theft. The Imperva research team note that in just one month it saw an average of 144 attacks per application with attack vectors related to these SuperGlobal parameters. They also witnessed attack campaigns which lasted five months or more, with 'request burst floods' as high as 90 hits per minute on a single given application.

Highlights from the report, which can be downloaded for free here, include:

• Key exposures in third-party infrastructure demonstrate need for an “opt out” security model. The report found a vulnerability in the very popular PhpMyAdmin (PMA) utility, used to …

Not a body part per se, but the most attractive to me is the personality above all else. After that, then eyes, mouth and, ernm, yep, bum... Hey, I'm only human ;)

Users of online banking services are at risk from a new 'in the wild' Trojan, Hesperbot, which has been discovered by the ESET malware research lab.

Researchers have found that infections of users in Turkey are currently most rife, with users in the Czech Republic, Portugal, Thailand and the United Kingdom also falling victim along with smatterings elsewhere. Victims in the Czech Republic, so it would seem, have been hardest in terms of financial loss with ESET claiming that people hit by Hesperbot in this region have "lost significant amounts of money as a result".

Hesperbot is spread using very credible looking phishing emails, with the primary aim of accessing bank accounts and a secondary one of attempting to install a mobile component of the malware on mobile devices running Android, Blackberry or Symbian operating systems.

Hesperbot appears to be quite a sophisticated piece of malware. Although it has the kind of key logger capabilities, desktop screen shot and video capture functionality and remote proxy set-up that you might expect of any self-respecting malware these days, Hesperbot goes the extra mile as it were. Additional tricks include creating a hidden VNC server on the infected system, and the addition of network traffic interception and HTML injection capabilities.

Researchers say that while the functionality is similar to Zeus or SpyEye, both banking Trojans that have been around for some time, Hesperbot introduces significant implementation differences and as such is a brand new malware family rather than just a new variant of …

A Freedom of Information request from staff at the UK offices of the Huffington Post has revealed, according to a BBC report on the story, that more than 300,000 attempts were made to access pornographic websites from the Houses of Parliament during the last 12 months. Of course, just looking at the headlines or even the figures quoted in the stories that follow them doesn't always reveal the bigger picture. Often, sadly, all you are left with is something of a blank canvas.

The original Huffington Post story reported how authorities had "acknowledged that users of the Parliamentary Network servers, including both MPs and their staff, have repeatedly attempted to access websites classed on Parliament's network as pornographic". It also went on to note that officials had explained the figures were 'inflated' by websites which automatically refreshed, and pop-ups and pop-unders, along with embedded images or video, could also increase the access attempt numbers greatly. Perhaps most confusing, and making the whole investigation somewhat pointless, was the fact that parliamentary officials refused to define what the servers classified as pornographic in the first place, and refused to do so on the good old get out of security grounds.

Philip Lieberman, CEO of security outfit Lieberman Software Corporation, reckons that the officials are right in that regard at least: pornography is a security issue. "Porn sites as bait, has been a long time vector of malware and those that seek to gain surreptitious access to systems" he says, continuing …

I wouldn't worry about it too much. Your overall post rating is 69% and you have 18 members who have uprated you compared to just 2 that have downvoted. If it keeps up, let us know and we will monitor the situation but, to be honest the anonymous nature of the post rating system (as opposed to the reputation system) makes it difficult to do much about it. Chances are you have annoyed (possibly downvoted) someone immature and they have responded by hitting the downvote button a few times. I

Adding a 'favourite link' to everything posted is, if you think about it, just spam. Links are allowed in your signature, but read the rules about ensuring your posts have substance and are in context rather than just being vehicles to promote that signature. Likewise, links are allowed in posts of they are genuinely helpful in the context of the thread (answering a question, providing help etc) rather than just being used as an opportunity to plug something you are connected with. It really isn't that difficult to grasp, to be honest, and the vast majority of members do get it. As I said when I unbanned you, make sure you read and absorb the rules and you will be welcomed into the community here with open arms Kamrul.

Java vulnerabilities have hardly been out of the news during the last year. Here at DaniWeb we've covered a number of the stories as they surfaced: Java in the cross-hairs: the security debate rolls on, Is Java 7 still insecure? Oracle Patch doesn't fix underlying vulnerability, Update my insecure Java plug-in? Meh, say 72% of users and WARNING: New zero-day for Java 6u41 and Java 7u15. It's the latter two that are pertinent as to why I'm covering the whole Java exploits story again. It would appear that the CVE-2013-2463 vulnerability in the Java 2D subcomponent is still problematical, even though it was addressed in an Oracle patch for Java 7 back in June. Why so? Those previous stories give the clue: updating an insecure version of Java. In this case, Oracle has admitted that the same vulnerability exists for Java 6 but as it went end of life in April 2013, it's no longer supported and that means no patch.

This is what Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys, calls an implicit zero-day vulnerability. Think of this as being where a vulnerability is known but there is no available patch to prevent its exploitation. No surprise then, that security vendors have seen this Java 6 zero-day exploit in the wild and even, according to F-Secure, an inclusion for it in the Neutrino exploit kit. The trouble being, as Qualys points out, that instances of Java 6 installations are …

Code tags removed by me for clarity, not that it helps much :)

Dani, profanity filter posts it as scunthorpe as it sees something after the s and before the h. I'm trying not to spell it out here, but:

S C U N T H O R P E :)

FireEye Labs has released a set of tools with the sole purpose of helping organisations detect and examine infections by the Poison Ivy RAT. Cleverly called Calamine, this collection of free tools promises to give security professionals the opportunity to identify the indicators of a Poison Ivy attack including the process mutex and password, decoded command and control traffic and a malware activity timeline.

By connecting these facets of the attack, and correlating them with multiple attacks displaying similar identifying features, FireEye hopes that the bad guys can be better profiled and combining big-picture intelligence with granular evidential detail organisational IT defence can be enhanced.

Now you might be thinking that Poison Ivy is old news, after all this particular Remote Access Trojan is not only considered the stuff of script kiddie n00b hackers but at eight years of age it's also been around long enough to be well and truly in the detection radar. Yet FireEye Labs research suggests quite the opposite, having discovered it to be at the heart of such big breaches as a RSA SecurID data attack in 2011 and insisting it has evidence of Poison Ivy being involved in "hundreds of attacks" that target very high profile enterprises.

Attacks involving several ongoing nation-state threat 'actors' identified by FireEye such as:

• admin@338: Active since 2008, this actor mostly targets the financial services industry. FireEye has also observed activity from this actor in telecom, government, and defense sectors.
• th3bug: First detected in 2009, FireEye …

Why now using a different account? Admins can see the IP address you know...

I interviewed a bug hunter at the end of last year for PC Pro magazine, so you might find some of what he had to say of interest. The interview is here, and a broader feature about zero-day bounty hunters is here.

The AR.Drone is what is known as a quadricopter device, and the Parrot drones are probably responsible for kick-starting the whole consumer drone industry. Unpacking the box you immediately notice how light it is, and how little you get by way of stuff to assemble or plug-in. Beyond the couple of hulls, one for indoor use (it has rotor damage protection) and one for outside, the battery packs and the charger, there's precious little else. Well, you get some stickers for playing augmented reality and target games, and rather worryingly some double sided tape for making repairs to the drone itself. There's no remote controller to pilot the drone, for that you use your smartphone or tablet. In my case I used an iPad with the relevant piloting apps from the App Store, but there are apps for Android available from Google Play as well.

Stick the bits together, fire up the app and start flying. It really is as simple as that. The AR.Drone uses Wi-Fi for piloting control, which provides an effective range of about 50 meters or 165 feet and comes with a built-in stabilization system to make flying as easy as possible. The addition of a 1280x720 HD camera for taking both stills and recording video adds enormously to both the fun and function of the drone and elevates it above being just a toy. As well as the recording capability, you also get real time video feedback through your smartphone …

I'm sure everyone would like to join me in welcoming the newest member of the DaniWeb moderating team, and a much deserved appointment it is too:

JorgeM

Within days of the New York Times website suffering an outage which was widely reported as being down to another cyber attack, although the NYT itself insists it was actually an internal issue following system maintenance, media sites belonging to CNN, Time and the Washington Post have been attacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SRA) in support of President Bashar al-Assad. All three sites concerned apparently used a single link recommendation service called Outbrain, and it seems that a social engineering attack there led to the successful breach.

Outbrain announced yesterday that "we have fully secured the network and resumed service. If you have additional questions about the incident, please do not hesitate to contact us" and stated that it would be "compiling a fuller brief on the episode to share with anyone who would like more information. If you want to receive the brief, please email publishersupport@outbrain.com".

The Washington Post has apparently also come under attack using targeted social engineering and advanced phishing tactics earlier in the week, before the Outbrain plug-in breach, and the SEA had some success in compromising account password security. Managing Editor Emilio Garcia-Ruiz admits "the attack resulted in one staff writer’s personal Twitter account being used to send out a Syrian Electronic Army message." The SEA have had quite some success in compromising the social media accounts of the media, with the New York Post also seeing Facebook and Twitter accounts posting similar messages.

Darien …

Just a heads up, noticing a small number of duplicate posts with the same time stamp since the changeover (only mentioning it as it's pretty rare otherwise - this is not an epidemic, just a handful of doubles) - see http://www.daniweb.com/members/1087776/Aiswarya1/posts for example.

Interestingly, I note there's also a bit of lag with the system catching up to what's happening after something is deleted: delete one of the duplicates and it still shows in the forum thread display even though I have refreshed it - for between 10 and 30 seconds. Wonder if this display lag is causing people to double post, thinking they have not successfully posted in the first place?

Fast food chain KFC has had more than its fair share of Kentucky Fried WHAT? myths busted over the years. However, some of the stories turn out to be genuine such as the breaded and deep fried kidney that was discovered by Ibrahim Langoo in a KFC in Colchester, England recently.

I was therefore intrigued to learn that a worm had been found inside a KFC product. When I spotted that the press release detailing this came from the PR people at Internet security specialists McAfee I kind of started to realise that this was no food story, but rather an IT one. But that doesn't make it any the less disturbing, just disturbing from a different angle.

Yep, the labs team at McAfee have identified a Windows worm residing in each Android device that has installed the ‘KFC WOW@25 Menu’. McAfee insists that although the malware poses no security danger for Android devices, the same application has been proven to be dangerous to other mobile and PC platforms and as such is of concern.

Apparently, the generic 'Malware.og!ats' worm was found to be embedded within an APK file and replicates itself via network shares. Although there is no auto-execution option for the malware itself on a Windows PC, McAfee warns that a user could run the malicious application by opening the APK (in Zip format) and then running the program.

OK, so it's a bit of a stretch that this worm is going to do …

Looking increasingly like b...

The whole culture of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in the workplace has reignited the mobile device security debate. Although there are many ways to protect data, the first line of defence when a mobile device (be it a tablet or smartphone) is lost or stolen is almost always going to be a password of some kind. I'm not going to get into the relative merits of PINs and passwords against more robust methods of data protection, that's for another time, instead let's just focus on the use of passwords. Have you ever wondered how many people are actually using them at all, how many businesses require their BYOD employees to password protect them at the very least?

Fibrelink secures more than a million business devices worldwide, and has tapped into the data it gets from these to examine password usage in the enterprise and provide some answers to those questions. Unfortunately, the answers are not particularly comforting on the whole. The data reveals, for example, that the majority of businesses still only require a weak password and a surprising number require none at all.

OK, so how was the data obtained? Well, the password information was determined by analysing a random sampling of 1,000 of Fiberlink’s 5,000 customers or, put another way, 200,000 or so of the one million smartphones and tablets under Fibrelink management. A simple password was defined as being either a PIN or a string of letters, whereas a complex one contains a combination …

The Onion Router, better known as the Tor Network, is often thought of as being the dark-side of the web. Not least as the anonymity provided by Tor meant that sites hosted on so-called hidden service servers were free to trade in just about anything from drugs and guns through to child pornography. In amongst the depravity and illegal excess, of course, were political activists and dissidents looking for an online safe haven in order to escape persecution, prosecution and potentially death. Revelations that the FBI would appear to have been behind the takedown of Freedom Hosting, apparently responsible for a bunch of hidden services which included alleged child pornography image servers, could be very bad news indeed. Not just for drug dealers, arms dealers and paedophiles but for anyone who has relied upon the multi-layered and encrypted onion network to retain their anonymity.

Reports as to the extent of the FBI operation fallout on the Tor Network vary, with some claiming as many as half of all Tor sites could have been compromised as a result. And that includes The Silk Road. This infamous site, only accessible through a Tor connection using the Tor browser, has been the online underground drugs marketplace of choice for some years now. Indeed, IT security investigative journalist Brian Krebs recently documented how cybercriminals had used The Silk Road to purchase heroin and have it sent to his home address in a failed attempt to frame him …

DaniWeb rules quite clearly state: Do not ask for help to pursue any illegal activity including, but not limited to, hacking and spamming.

Please think carefully before going any further down this line of questioning, Arnel.

Well that's a really clear question. Not.

If you are asking for a commercial activation code for a product you have illegally downloaded instead of purchased, then not only can we not help you, we will not help you and your request is in breach of DaniWeb rules.

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W? T? F?

Seriously...

UK home shopping pioneers Lakeland have sent an email to all customers past and present to warn them that the retailers website has been hacked. What Managing Director Sam Rayner calls a "sophisticated and sustained attack" took place late on Friday 19th July. Measures were taken at the time to block that attack and repair the system, however the ongoing investigation has revealed that two encrypted databases were compromised.

In that email to customers, Rayner states that the company has been "unable to find any evidence that the data has been stolen" but nonetheless has taken immediate action to delete all customer passwords used on the site. Customers logging in will be required to choose a new password.

Although further details are scarce at this point in time beyond the hack using "a very recently identified flaw in the Java software used by the servers", Lakeland is to be applauded for a timely and honest disclosure of the breach. Rayner calls this a "policy to be open and honest with our customers" and although he continues to state that it is not known for certain that the hackers succeeded in stealing data Rayner does wisely admit that there is a 'theoretical risk' and as such think it best to be "proactive in alerting" customers. Obviously there is some careful wording being used here to try and mitigate any brand damage, and I'm no great fan of the whole 'potential/theoretical' language approach when disclosing such attacks …