A Windows 2003 server machine I use may, or may not, have been infected with the Clampi trojan (ilomi.b or ilomo.c, which depending on your font, may look a lot like llomi or IIlomi or ILomi).
I say “may not”, because the combination of “Windows 2003” and "antivirus” has a high rate of false positive claims that can wreak as much destruction as the antiviral software.
In researching the Clampi trojan Google suggested I read this summary (emphases mine) …
Clampi/Ligats/Ilomo Trojan - Research - SecureWorks
… Clampi’s recent success in infecting victims is accomplished by using domain administrator credentials (either stolen by the Trojan or re-used, or by virtue of the fact that a domain administrator has logged into an already infected system). Once domain administrator privileges are granted, the Trojan uses the SysInternals tool "psexec" to copy itself to all computers on the domain.
Clampi also serves as a proxy server used by criminals to anonymize their activity when logging into stolen accounts…
… Clampi is operated by a serious and sophisticated organized crime group from Eastern Europe and has been implicated in numerous high-dollar thefts from banking institutions. Any user whose system has been infected by Clampi should immediately change any and all passwords used on that system for any websites, but especially financial credentials.
… Most major anti-virus engines should be able to detect Clampi variants; however there is always a delay between a new Trojan release and the detection time. Given the prevalence and seriousness of the Clampi Trojan, it is recommended that businesses that carry out online banking/financial transactions adopt a strategy to isolate workstations where these activities are carried out from possible Clampi or other data-stealing Trojan infections.
This may include using a dedicated workstation for accessing financial accounts which is isolated from the rest of the local network and the Internet except for the specific financial sites required to be accessed. Since Trojans can also be spread using removable drives, systems should be hardened against auto run-type threats. Businesses may even consider using an alternative operating system for workstations accessing sensitive or financial accounts.
Home Computer User Protection
SecureWorks CTU recommends that home computer users use a computer dedicated only to doing their online banking and bill pay. They should not use that computer to surf the web and send and receive email, since web exploits and malicious email are two of the key malware infection vectors.
As an alternative to operating a secure home PC for all important work, home users could, you know, buy a Mac. They would then have one machine to use for everything.[1]
Maybe Apple is funding Clampi development?
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[1] The Mac’s vast security advantage comes from the “faster friend” security philosophy. When you and a friend are being chased by a bear, you don’t have to be faster than the bear, you have be faster than your friend. OS X 10.6 is, in practical terms, fundamentally more secure than XP, but not necessarily theoretically more secure than Microsoft’s very latest foul demon. The big Mac advantage is that the world’s criminals don’t own Apple machines, and have very little interest in targeting Macs as long as the vast majority of banks and corporations run some flavor of Windows. I’ve often wondered, incidentally, if Windows 98 isn’t now a very secure environment. I doubt many Trojans would infect it any more.
Gordon's Notes: John Edwards: Another man the media dislikes
It's increasingly clear that the US media dislikes John Edwards almost as much as they disliked Al Gore. Digby draws some conclusions ...
"...Ambinder says right out that "fairly or unfairly" the press can't stand John Edwards and so they are going to bury him. This is, of course, not unprecedented, since we saw what they did to Al Gore for the same reason... (And there is no question about whether it's fair. It most certainly isn't.)
Now, I am not especially surprised that the press corps doesn't like John Edwards. Many of these people probably didn't like guys like him in high school either and one thing we know about the political press corps is that they have never matured beyond the 11th grade.... I have to ask, once again, just who in the hell these people think they are and why they think they are allowed to pick our candidates for us based upon their own "feelings" about them? ...
Each time they've pulled this puerile nonsense in the last few years, it's resulted in a mess that's going to take even more years to unravel. And they learned nothing, apparently, since they are doing exactly the same thing in this election. If the press really wants to know why they are held in lower esteem than hitmen and health insurance claims adjusters, this is it..."
Krugman had a similar rant a while back. I don't think the '11th grade' is the full story; we need an insider to figure this one out. I do agree that the US media have about as much right as the GOP to be sanctimonious. Their star hangs low.In Slate on Jan 29 Christopher Beam tells us the tricks of Edwards affair(s).
Bill Watterson, creator of beloved 'Calvin and Hobbes' comic strip looks back ... cleveland.com
... It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now "grieving" for "Calvin and Hobbes" would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.
I think some of the reason "Calvin and Hobbes" still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.
I've never regretted stopping when I did...Makes one miss his voice all the more. Of course, never return to Calvin and Hobbes, but does he really have nothing to say that we would like to hear?
This Friday, when the traditional media was going to sleep, Amazon removed all Macmillan books from its online store. Not just eBooks, everything.
It was a bold move in a price-and-control technology-transition-type war with book publishers. Superficially, it looks like the kind of thing Apple did to the music labels. Corporate warfare – who cares?
Except there’s always collateral damage. In this case, including science fiction writers.
Who are, often, geeks. Geeks who write. Geeks who write well for money. Geeks with printing presses and readers.
By Friday night, the hellfire had begun …
It kept coming through the weekend. By Sunday Amazon surrendered unconditionally …
I never even got to write the blog post I was mentally composing.
I wonder how long it took Amazon’s executive team to recognize they had to bail. Six hours?
They never even got to face the wrath of the mystery fans, much less the romance readership. For both of those readerships, however, the news and response would have had to go through ailing newspaper channels. The response cycle would have taken weeks, and Amazon’s ploy might have worked.
Science fiction writers have a far more connected, and more vicious, readership.
I trust Amazon and Apple have learned something. If they want to crush book publishers, they must first win over the science fiction writers. They are, however, a very suspicious and imaginative bunch …
PS. Amazon just killed the Kindle. Smart move guys.
Once upon a time it was every computer virus for itself. In those days there wasn’t much competition, and there wasn’t much of a business model.
Now there are business models for viruses, all based on variations of fraud and theft. Computers are important resources – they provide access to vulnerable wetware and replication facilities.
We know how this sort of thing works in the wet world. A dead host is a dead end. If a computer is so disabled that it become intolerably annoying, the wetware will turn it off. The optimal infection would make the computer more attractive, increasing the return on fraud and the replication rate.
So we would expect computer viruses to start fighting one another, each struggling to create the optimal infection. In time, some would start collaborating, creating de facto alliances. Synergies. Communities. Ecologies.
Except computer viruses don’t, yet, mostly, mutate and evolve in the traditional sense. They develop through vaguely-intelligent design. Still, this is the path they’re following. Modern computer infections include routines to disable rivals.
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Well, it doesn’t exactly, but close enough. It’s such a cool meme, one can’t avoid replicating it.
In this instance, though, it’s cybology that recapitulates immunogenesis. We’ve long noted that the human immune system seemed to have quite a bit in common with the viruses and other infections it more or less opposes – when it’s not turning on us that is. Now we know that animals are, in large part, holobiontic ecologies of coopetiting viri.
Which makes it easier to understand how bacterial life ever developed in a sea of seething viri, and then became intracellular things like mitochondria and chloroplasts. Not only understandable, but perhaps inevitable. Inevitable that viruses should emergently collaborate to create bacteria, and thus cells and animals that should have minds and memes and computers and thus to other things too.
Samuel Pisar - Out of Auschwitz - NYTimes.com
... those of us who survived have a duty to transmit to humankind the memory of what we endured in body and soul, to tell our children that the fanaticism and violence that nearly destroyed our universe have the power to enflame theirs, too. The fury of the Haitian earthquake, which has taken more than 200,000 lives, teaches us how cruel nature can be to man. The Holocaust, which destroyed a people, teaches us that nature, even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man when he loses his moral compass and his reason.
After so much death, a groundswell of compassion and solidarity for victims — all victims, whether from natural disasters, racial hatred, religious intolerance or terrorism — occasionally manifests itself, as it has in recent days.
These actions stand in contrast to those moments when we have failed to act; they remind us, on this dark anniversary, of how often we remain divided and confused, how in the face of horror we hesitate, vacillate, like sleepwalkers at the edge of the abyss. Of course, they remind us, too, that we have managed to stave off the irrevocable; that our chances for living in harmony are, thankfully, still intact.
Even if we found aliens, how would we communicate? -Hear that Zorgonian containment module 34141434? You can turn off the signal scrambler system now ...
News, TV & Radio - The Independent
... If we do detect signals of extraterrestrial intelligence, one question posed by scientist attending the conference is how to cope with the public response. Will it result in fear, mass panic and riots?
Professor Albert Harrison of the University of California, Davis, believes this is unlikely, based on what he calls “historical prototypes”. In any case, social policies could be used to ease humanity into the “postcontact” era, he said.
“Many people already believe that extraterrestrial intelligence exists and are confident of their own ability to withstand the discovery but doubt other peoples’ abilities to cope,” Professor Harrison said.
“It is easy to imagine scenarios resulting in widespread psychological disintegration and social chaos, but historical prototypes, reactions to false alarms and survey results suggest that the predominant response to the discovery of microwave transmission from light years away is likely to be equanimity, perhaps even delight,” he said....
... I don't think AT&T is getting a taste of the $629. I've never heard of that happening before, and Apple has way too much leverage against AT&T. I suspect the iPad price plans were part of some larger negotiation. (e.g., I wouldn't be surprised to start hearing rumors that AT&T's exclusive contract is extended.)
Also, don't forget that Apple gets a cut of your monthly iPhone bill. Apple/AT&T negotiations probably focused on that more than anything. My guess is that Apple reduced their cut in order to get a monthly price that they thought consumers would tolerate for a new and unproven device/market...
