Will – Paul's Tech Talk

Are You and Your Friends Fine — Virus Spam

PaulMarch 22, 2009

Logged into my Google Email and was checking my spam to see what I see and this one draws my attention:

I think I know where this is leading me but I click the link and this website with the Reuters logo pops up:

Now as you can tell this looks authentic but when I did go to this site, AVG detected some trojan. It blocked it, but the file that it is downloaded called “save.exe” and I have talked about [intlink id=”2991″ type=”post” target=”_blank”]flash player fake updates[/intlink]. I have seen other blogs talking about dirty bomb news report leads to malware. I don’t know about you but if I wanted to update my flash player, I go to the source and not use any links. It is wise not to download any programs or files and run them without properly checking them out for viruses and Trojans. You should have a fiewall and anti-virus running at all times and that will help but it is your actions that help your prevent from getting viruses or Trojans.

Is Google the ultimate news source?

PaulMarch 12, 2009

As you know We had a big problem Monday Night and All day Tuesday. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you would of noticed either a 503 or lag. It was due to an article that I released late Monday night about the PIFTS.EXE and the so call conspiracy.

At the time, I was wondering and quite disturbed about what Norton Symantec was doing to the forums. So I blogged about this and wouldn’t you know my site was Held Hostage by Google. I kid you not, I had so many people come to my site in under an hour it wasn’t even funny.

[ad#cricket-right-ez]So I sit here, asking a really good question is Google the News? I don’t know exactly when but according to Wikipedia Google was formed in 1998. The Google Motto is Don’t Be Evil, and I guess it makes them look like a news source. When did they get past the news site? I would hazard a guess that it was in late 2004 they started when they when Google gave people the first chance to own the stock on August 19, 2004, when Google became a publicly held company.

I got hit hard by Slashdot, Reddit.com, and Google. In truthfulness, It was more of searches and people coming from Google than anywhere else. I would say Google was the 90% and and Slashdot and Redidit was 8% and the rest was from other websites for this one article. Now don’t get me wrong the 2% of people was my normal amount of people for the day. So you can imagine how many people actually came to my site over this fiasco.

I call this a fiasco because basically it was one that really made me worry about the server going down. People seemed to try to find out about this program and some of them didn’t even do any more research than to come to my site? Although I do know a little, I have always considered myself to be a BLUE COLLAR Tech Blogger. So you can just call me “The Blue Collar Tech Blogger” when it comes to things like this. I will never proclaim I know everything and I am still learning every day I blog I learn something new.

So this leaves me with a question on how did Blogs become the news also? Did we step into the roll of news? I know there are many blogs out there that are telling the news and are almost as if they are the news. Is that where this has become Web 2.0? I throw these questions out to see what type of comment. I just thought this was a good topic for today to talk about.

Thinking back to PIFTS.EXE.

PaulMarch 11, 2009

Thinking to this very incident looks to something out of the movie “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events“. I won’t go into much detail but here is what I want answers to about the PIFTS.EXE. You see after I have read a great article talking in detail about this, I have also come to the conclusion something isn’t right.

[ad#cricket-right-ez]The blog owner known as Anshar in the forums on the Symantec points out some key events. He wanted to point out that the users who were posting were not violating the TOS and was posting questions that look to asking about this file. See screen capture of what I took. This one picture doesn’t prove his theory in whole, but does bring up some suspicions. This actually might be them trying to find a ‘scapegoat’ so to speak. He also talks about what others are asking? What is PIFTS.EXE? People seem to still have not be answered that question.

Although, in Norton’s defense there seems to be a lot of information that they have to sort through. I’ll admit this information people are asking should be really simple to find in the Symantec Databases somewhere. I will not say they are hiding anything major but I do think something is going on that we are not aware of. Here’s some other thoughts to considers? If Norton needed to find out who was using Windows 7, couldn’t they of asked or even made a simple site redirect to find that information, after all anytime you visit a site you have that information sent to the stats. I could in theory find out how many visitors are visiting from Macs and how many are on older systems. That would be very easy to do with Google Analytics.

Now with that said let’s talk about Why it took almost a whole day for them to release a public statement about what happened. I might be wrong but if I was a stockholder, I’d of demanded them to send that out ASAP instead of waiting 20 to 24 hours. Although I’m not trying to make any more conspiracy theories, I do think the Streisand effect came into effect and people are feeling like Norton did something they shouldn’t have. In which case, Norton probably made “A fail whale” attempt of making it better when they started to delete the post.

I’ve been watching the Norton forums trying to make sense of all this, and I do know that Norton have lost people’s faith in them and people are removing their product off there systems if Norton doesn’t start answering questions that need to be answered.

Norton has released the information of PIFTS.EXE and what it does. Although I am sure people are going to argue about what it does or doesn’t. I wanted to post this for people to check out and consider for yourself.

Conspiracy theories run rampent due to PIFTS.EXE

PaulMarch 10, 20092 Replies

(Looks like some of this was a 4chan gag, check my other post about it)

All of the sudden people around the World are seeing PIFTS.EXE popping up. Norton Antivirus is asking users if they want to accept it. Here what I do know:

Here’s some information I pulled from my Zone Alarm Logs. Does this make sense to anyone?
[ad#cricket-right-ez]2009/03/09 18:26:44 — New Program — PIFTS.exe — Destination IP: 67.134.208.160:80 — outgoing — blocked — Destination: ping.lifecycle.norton.com

2009/03/09 18:47:52 — Program Access — PIFTS.exe — Destination IP: — outgoing — blocked — Destination:

2009/03/09 18:48:28 — Changed Program — Windows Explorer — 207.46.248.249.80 — outgoing — blocked — Destination: sa.windows.com
[Via The Symatec Forums]

This indicates that the program tried to change tactics to go out on the net. I look a look for this and it is SwapDrive. So this must be an update to Swapdrive but I am unsure as to why it pops up that way. The other ip is in Africa or at least take the .80 out of the equation and it points to an Africa IP. (It looks to my mistake in that little part, “to error is human” Check out this post about it) Although just recently Norton Decides to Delete that thread and people are really worried about why? Is this a cover up of some sort because there is a exploit in the Wild that we don’t know about? These are good questions that need to be answered. Here is what one posted about this just after they deleted the forum thread:

As you can see people are taking this deletion on the community forum thread very seriously, they know something is not right in Denmark. I also want to point out this one:

I don’t know what Norton is up to but this is making me uneasy. If they are worried about something that they can’t explain or don’t want to explain then they have made a mistake. Some users are really worried now because Norton isn’t saying anything at all. I love this post:

As you can see people see this and are worried, I didn’t want these to be taken offline like the first post so I make physical copies to put on my blog. I want to prove to people that these actually existed. I would advise people to run Hijackthis to see if you can figure out where this is coming from. I don’t know why they would hide the truth, it will bite them in the end. Anyone want to comment on this, I am quiet curious??

*UPDATE 12:01 am 03/10/09*

Seems Norton Deleted all post about PIFTS.EXe so I don’t know what happened but This will have to come out in the open sooner or later. I just hope it isn’t going to be to late.

Update 12:15am 03/10/09*

Seems people have decided to go to the Zonealarm forums to discuss this:

You can visit there forums here. I am getting more curious about this little situation and now tempted to stay up all night watching this!!

[ad#digg-right]I also found this forum thread from BuckeyePlanet. I am seeing more and more people blogging about this. So this must be something REALLY big. Keep sending me comments if you find anything else. Don’t forget to add me on Twitter.

This looks interesting:
[ad#cricket-1]

Even more interestingly now, after posting a single post asking about PIFTS.exe, which was deleted, and a subsequent post to another forum asking about the deleted posts, which got deleted, I’ve now been blocked from creating new posts or replies on the Norton forums. They really don’t want to talk about whatever this was.

And doubly interesting — or perhaps not, who knows — not sure if this is standard practice at Symantic or what, but opening the PIFTS.exe in a hex editor shows a large section of the end of the file consists only of “PADDINGXX” repeated over and over. I’ve got some background in programming and can’t think of a good reason why you would need padding like that on a legitimate executable. However, if an executable in an update has been compromised it may require padding such as that to match the original executable’s file size or something. But that’s just pointless conspiracy theorizing that likely has no basis. It would be nice though to hear from Norton about what the **bleep** this thing is.
[Via Zonealarm Forum]

I don’t know but I suspecting an update went wrong at least from all the indications I’m seeing.

I will say you have several options available to you:

You could get a Free Anti-virus Software

You could run without An Anti-virus (Not a great option, wouldn’t suggest it)

You could do nothing and wait. (My recommendation until I find out the the full story!!)

Please let’s not start a pandemic over this, I am however worried because Norton has yet to release any public information about this? I will update as needed but please people let’s not go to OVERBOARD on this!!

Google Get’s rid of the Trend “PIFTS.EXE, no long there. It was there last night. Hmm even more questions and answers? (Click image to view it!!)

On a side note, I do not have a
ccess to this file. I’ve had a friend who told me about this and I started to investigate it and as soon as I did that Norton started to kill the messages. That when I knew it was something big. That is why I blogged about it. I do not have the program. I just know that it is being searched really hard because I’ve had more people coming to my site than usual. So please don’t ask about samples, you can comment on this or ask questions. I provide this for the community to let them know!!

(Looks like some of this was a 4chan gag, check my other post about it)

I hate Snopes Spam

PaulMarch 5, 2009

As you know Snopes is used to find out about urban Legend and Rumors:

I received a Virus alert from my RSS feed about Email virus warning. It even adds a Snope URL. The Author just copies and pasted the virus warning into the blog without even going to Snopes.
[ad#ad2-right]

According to Snopes and I’ll quote:
Although the Postcard virus is real, it isn’t a “BIG VIRUS COMING” (it’s already been around in multiple forms for a long time now), it will not “burn the whole hard disc” of your computer, CNN didn’t classify it as the “worst virus” ever, and it doesn’t arrive in messages bearing a subject line of ‘Invitation.’

[Via Snopes]

Now as you can tell the link described in the blog post was “http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/postcard.asp”. If you went there, you’d have seen this as a not really true and some parts of this might be but that part about burning your Hard drive or even consider the Worst virus isn’t true.

Some things you need to consider before forwarding anything is:

Is it completely True?

Is it Legitimate? (True blown warning about something like a product recall or something important like that)

Does it Say to Forward? (if so it is probably not wise)

is it from a Friend (If so you might want to remind the friend nicely that it isn’t nice to send spam)

If you follow some of these suggestions you’ll be making the Internet a far better place for everyone. Remember if you don’t know, it’s time to learn. if you do know, it is time to teach. These are the fundamental aspects of using the internet the right way. Also if it is a fake virus warning you should tell them to get a Free Anti-virus and Firewall to better protect them. Also remind them that if they keep their system updated then they shouldn’t be too worried. Remember only you can prevent a Computer Virus and it’s up to you keep your system up to date.