Skip to main content

Virus Writers Have A New Found Love - Wikipedia

The information available inside these free-for-editing Online Encyclopedias and Wikis may not be 100% safe anymore.

Virus creators in Germany adopted a novel approach to trick Wikipedians into downloading viruses onto their computers as discovered by Sophos.

According to Internet News, Hackers created a new page on the German edition of Wikipedia with details of a new version of Blaster worm. They also included a download link to a patch that removes the virus. Now the problem was that the patch itself was a virus.

The hackers then also sent out an email to German users, supposedly from Wikipedia itself, alerting recipients to the new entry after the Blaster worm.

Heise adds that the body of the e-mail itself refers to a Wikipedia article containing links to the domain wikipedia-download.org, where the recipients of the e-mail are to download the alleged new patches.

The article even goes so far as to claim that the new Blaster attack has overloaded Microsoft's servers, forcing Microsoft to ask Wikipedia to help distribute the updates.

While Wikipedia quickly erased the offending page and not many people were affected by the Wikipedia Virus, this is definitely an alarming development. As a first step, Wikipedia should ban direct linking to EXE, BAT, COM and other executable files.

Wikipedia W32.Blaster [in German]

Popular posts from this blog

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include...
Read more

Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts for Power Users

All features in Mozilla Firefox browser are accessible through the use of the keyboard. You can use shortcut keys to view and save Web pages, search the web, open new webpages, work with bookmarks, or find text on the current webpage. Some of the most common keyboard shortcuts in Mozilla Firefox are Ctrl+N (to open a new Firefox window), Ctrl+T (to open a new tab), Ctrl+F4 (to close the current tab) and Ctrl+S to save the current webpage. Mozilla Firefox supports many more powerful keyboard shortcuts. For instance, by pressing a simple key combination, you can manually delete autocomplete entries from the Firefox location bar or Web forms. I am sharing a list of my favorite Mozilla Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts that make web browsing with Firefox even more fun . And you also save your precious time as navigating through several layers of Firefox Toolbar menus is no longer necessary. 1. Web Search Ctrl+K moves the cursor to the Search Bar. You can then type in the terms you wish to fin...
Read more

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by  Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include  Gmail Mail Merge  (send personalized emails with Gmail ),  Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and   File Upload Forms ( receive files  in Google Drive). Also see  Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.
Read more