thewayne: (Default)
2020-02-15 07:53 pm

Passengers on the quarantined cruise ship may be repatriated

The State Dept has arranged for a convoy of buses and planes to bring them back to the United States, but their ordeal is far from over. I was unclear if they're flying out of a Japanese airport or US military base, I would suspect the latter. If they're flying US military transport, it won't exactly be a first-class flight, but at least they'll be a step closer to home and off that ship!

First, if they test to be positive for the virus, they're not leaving Japan. They'll stay there to be treated.

Second, when they arrive here, they're going straight to dedicated military bases for 14 day quarantines.

Third, if they choose NOT to go home in this mass exodus, the State Dept says they don't know when they'll get to come home!

So interesting stuff.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/us-to-evacuate-roughly-400-americans-on-quarantined-cruise-ship/
thewayne: (Default)
2011-05-05 09:42 pm
Entry tags:

A Mac OS-X crimeware kit is now available to griefers

They've been available for Windows platforms for several years now, so it was kind of inevitable that one would eventually be made for OS-X. It basically makes it easy for griefers to make trojans, presumably for botnet and similar things. It runs on Windows but has the option of generating binaries for OS-X. And here's some more joy: ""The kit is being sold under the name Weyland-Yutani BOT and it is the first of its kind to hit the Mac OS platform. Basically it's a GUI point & click interface to create payloads that are script kiddie friendly.

Apparently, a dedicated iPad and Linux release are under preparation as well. The Weyland-Yutani BOT supports web injects and form grabbing in Firefox; however both Chrome and Safari will soon follow. The webinjects templates are identical to the ones used in Zeus and Spyeye."
"

https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/crimeware-kit-emerges-mac-os-x-050211

There's also some fake Mac antivirus stuff going around: http://blog.intego.com/2011/05/02/intego-security-memo-macdefender-fake-antivirus/

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/05/02/2120203/OS-X-Crimeware-Kit-Emerges

At this point, the danger is if you open and run the payload, so once again, smarts is what will mostly keep you safe.
thewayne: (Default)
2008-06-08 01:24 am
Entry tags:

There's a new virus going around that encrypts your hard drive

This first appeared a couple of years ago and claimed to encrypt a variety of files on your hard drive with RSA 1024 bit encryption. The original virus did a poor job of implementing RSA encryption and was only using 660 bytes. Because of this weakness, data was recoverable.

Well, in the two years since it was originally released, the author has fixed the code and it now uses all 1024 bits, which means that it's fundamentally unbreakable.

So what happens if your computer gets encrypted? Better hope your backups are good.

Kaspersky Anti-Virus would also like to talk to you, there's a chance they can recover your data.

This Slashdot article points to the Kaspersky alert: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/05/1921232