New MyDoom Variant

Looks like there is a new MyDoom varient circulating via e-mail. However, this virus is a little different. There is no attachment in this e-mail -- it is a link that the recipient must click on. It takes them to a website and infects your computer. This was just raised to a medium risk today by McAfee .

This one sends an e-mail that looks like its from Paypal saying that money has successfully been charged to your credit card -- something like this:

Congratulations! PayPal has successfully charged $175 to your credit card. Your order tracking number is A866DEC0, and your item will be shipped within three business days.

"To see details please click this link."

The program also harvests addresses from local files and then uses the harvested addresses in the "from" field to send itself. Some of those e-mail messages contain the following:

"Hi! I am looking for new friends.

"My name is Jane, I am from Miami, FL.

"See my homepage with my weblog and last webcam photos! See you!"

Posted by Michael at 01:38 PM

New IE Vulnerability

According to Secunia Advisories, a new vulnerability for IE has been discovered that can allow your system to be exploited by other users. This was declared a rare "Extremely Critical" vulnerability by Secunia.

People who are running XP Service Pack 2 are not vulnerable. However, this is no known solution to this exploit other than installing SP2.

You can, however, choose to use another browser such as Firefox (www.getfirefox.com) which is not affected by this problem. Firefox has been gaining users and is now one of the most-used browsers on the market. Firefox 1.0 is being released tomorrow, November 9, 2004.

Posted by Michael at 11:30 AM