Windows Vista Source Code Leaked!
April 5, 2008 – 4:26 PM
Google Maps diminishing value of homes, causing “mental suffering”?
April 5, 2008 – 10:28 AMA couple is accusing Google of diminishing the value of their property and causing them “mental” suffering” for including their recluse home in the Google Maps Street View project. The road leading up to their house is apparently labeled “private”, something the Street View operator must’ve missed. We checked the Street View footage up to the house and didn’t notice any clear “private” signs, but don’t take our scientific analysis as fact.
They didn’t like that Google invaded their “privacy”. Some of the court papers are available online, and if you check them out, you’ll notice mainly boring gibberish but also the address of the home. Suing Google has already done more damage to their “privacy” than the pictures on their own.
Aaron and Christine Boring want at least $25,000 and the 360 degree pictures destroyed, but something tells us the case doesn’t stand a chance against Google’s well paid, state-of-the-art, corporate lawyers, which come from the best lawyer factories in the nation.
Source: Download Squad
Heads-up: Dangerous new customized IRS scam steals data
April 5, 2008 – 7:57 AMThis afternoon, we got a highly customized email purporting to come from the IRS, which of course, does nothing more than load malware.
The email is made out to a key financial contact here at Sunbelt (name obfuscated for this post).
As you can see, it’s quite convincing. (Incidentally, “Sunbelt Software Distribution, Inc.” is no longer our company name, it was recently changed to simply Sunbelt Software. But that’s a side note.)
Windows 7, Successor To Vista, May Ship Next Year
April 4, 2008 – 4:36 PMMicrosoft chairman Bill Gates said his company might ship a new version of its Windows operating system as soon as 2009.The news agency Reuters quoted Gates on Friday as saying that Windows 7 may be released “sometime in the next year or so.” That would put the software ahead of the three-year cycle that Microsoft normally works on for OS releases.
The current version of Windows, known as Vista, shipped in January 2007.
Microsoft to date has said little about Windows 7, which has been in development under the code name Blackcomb. It was generally believed that the OS would ship in the 2010 timeframe. In response to an inquiry from InformationWeek, Microsoft said in a statement that Windows 7 is “scoped to three years from Windows Vista Consumer GA. As is standard with the release of a new product, we will be releasing early builds of Windows 7 prior to its General Availability as a means to gain tester feedback.”
If Microsoft is moving up the release date for Windows 7, it may be because Vista has received only a lukewarm embrace from home and business computer users. Many have complained about Vista’s hefty resource requirements and lack of compatibility with their existing applications.
To experience all of Vista’s features, PC users need a computer with at least a 1-GHz processor, 1 GB of memory, and a 40-GB hard drive. By contrast, Windows XP Professional requires only a 300-MHz processor, 128 Mbytes of RAM, and a 1.5-GB disk.
Dissatisfaction with Vista has led Microsoft to extend the life of the older Windows XP OS for longer than originally planned.
Microsoft said Thursday that it would allow computer makers to continue to sell Windows XP on “ultra-low-cost PCs” for an extended period.
Microsoft said it would allow system vendors to preload the Home edition of Windows XP on ULCPCs through June 2010, or one year after the next version of Windows becomes generally available.
Microsoft defines ULCPCs as, among other things, systems that use discount-line processors and lack a separate graphics card. Such low-spec machines would be incapable of running Vista.
Gates was speaking at a seminar on corporate philanthropy in Miami, Reuters said.
Source: Information Week
Analysis of a Win32.Delf Variant
April 4, 2008 – 12:35 PMWe have been noticing quite a few malware samples having references to or communicating with Google’s SMTP servers. This post dissects one of these samples and in the process attempts to illustrate to the reader some reversing techniques and information gathering techniques, while explaining the behavior and impact of this virus. At the end of this post you will discover the reasoning for this SMTP reference and see a rather revealing screenshot showing its purpose.
Static Analysis
The first step we took was to verify whether the executable was compressed or protected. Loading this executable in PEiD resulted in “Borland Delphi 6.0 – 7.0”. Unless the signature was faked (explanation here), we can go straight to analysis. One of the great things about a Delphi application is that it can be decompiled and analyzed statically. You can use either DeDe by DaFixer[TMG] or DE Decompiler by GPcH. Because DeDe is typically used, we chose DE Decompiler for experimental purposes. If you open the malware in DE Decompiler, you see the following:
