The W32/Morto Worm

     New in the news world today is something that has happened before in the past.  That's right, it seems that Windows Systems are now vulnerable to a new worm again.  These exploits occurs due to weak security measures taken by, who guessed it?..  users of remote desktop software who set up their passwords really lazily!  Weak passwords that can easily be obtained with brute force dictionary cracks are being taken over by storm.  That's right, whoever of you are still using your first name or the last 4 digits of your social are running a high risk.  Both servers and workstations are targets.  Neither are safe.

This will do not good.

  Once the virus takes over a system it then connects to another server and checks if it needs to make any updates.  So if patches are made and you restart your machine while your AVG is starting up it will be too late because the boot sector has already triggered to update itself.  You mean I've got to reformat again?  Good thing I learned from last time and backed up all of my data, erhmmmmm.  Tools like Nmap, ettercap and Metasploit have been used to manually scan and find open holes in remote systems for years, and now this virus has been scripted to do all of this automatically and then report back to it's controllers with a wide array of system statistics to be stored in a database.  Imagine that, the attacker only has to then wait as the list of systems taken over increases.  They then have a spreadsheet full of addresses with the key codes and the size of storage available with instant access to bots that will do anything desired at those locations.  Sounds like the amount of control that Batman would have had to of used all of those microphones all over Gotham to track down the Joker.


  Anyways, Morto, the "death" worm, can obtain these weak administrator passwords automatically, even on systems with all of the latest patches.  Now once a system has been accessed the virus then deactivates the local security measures like anti-virus programs and firewalls in order to protect itself, then it checks for local network connections systems with the RDP enabled.  It then starts creating new files..

\windows\system32\sens32.dll
\windows\Offline Web Pages\cache.txt
\windows\Offline Web Pages\1.40_Test Ddos
\windows\Offline Web Pages\<DATE>


  ..and many more.  The systems can then be commanded remotely to launch strikes to targeted sites via Distributed Denial of Service invasions, flooding a network's service traffic with endless packets requesting information.  This causes a slowdown as no genuine user inquiries to a service are able to process amongst all of the inordinate junk queries.  It's kind of hard to defend against DDoS attacks because once an IP address is targeted it's kind of hard to defend against an attack.  It'd be like trying to keep your mailbox from being repeatedly destroyed by teenagers with baseball bats by moving your mailing address.  They won't know where to hit it again until they figure out where you moved it to, or figure out your P.O. Box number.  That analogy is useless in trying to find a way to stop this kind of action because snail mail relies much less on seemingly instantaneous transmissions as the internet.  Hopefully some day some creative individual, like whoever thought up this simplistic idea of spamming a website to shut it down, will think up a way to circumvent these sort of battles.  Something like proxies that only reveal the correct direction to go when a captcha has been correctly entered, but then the attackers would most likely just go after the proxies.

Sources:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/windows-servers-workstations-vulnerable-wicke 
http://home.mcafee.com/virusinfo/virusprofile.aspx?key=573843 

Tibia Silvera Knight Training Again

Yep, just training again, as the screenshot, tags and title would suggest.  It get's kind of boring but what better way to make the time pass than by doing several other things at the exact same time.  Good old multi-tasking.  If I could find any other things to do at the same time I think that I might be a tibia playing prodigy.  First off, I get my skills on my main, axe and shielding, with a little bit of magic level at the same time.  63% -> 8 at the moment, quite a ways to go until the all covetable magic level 9 required in order to shoot magic wall runes.  I'll benchmark it here as something to look back at a later time and see how far I've come.  A butterfly flies past the screenshot above as I check out the other skills.  Mainly I'm trying to up my fishing skill(54) in order to get another skill on the top 300 board with this character.  61 or 62 is what it's going to take and I was just 51 or 52 earlier so at this rate I could make it very soon.  I think it will be funny so I'm wasting my time doing it, all while training axe/shi/mag on my main and skills on some alts who will make for very fun PK chars.  That and, I thought that there was another multi-tasking thing that was getting done there at the same time, blogging?  A little bit of club/fist experience?  Uhmmmm, what was it.  (Sips another beer.)  Hmmmm, online time to demoralize the teams we are warring against perhaps?  It's been a fun night, listening to Dreaded Assassins team rocking the map tonight on ventrilo.  They've been dropping tons of members from Overmaster, Flawless Allies tonight.  I wish I could be there but my premmy hasn't went through yet.  84 axe and level 105.  I am aspiring to obtain 90 axe in order to be able to profitably and leisurly hunt the dragon lords of deeper fibula, as noted in yesterdays post.  Also striving towards level 110 to try at that nifty looking Annihilation spell on some war enemies.  It's gonna' get good here sooner or later.  Do what I can for this team, train ;p and drop the fish off in the guildhalls and look up whatever I can for them while they're on the fly.  Keep killin' and training or whatever it is you do and may your drops be unblessed ,,//_

Tibia Knight Training Skill

Been training down in Fibula lately.  It's a pretty good spot with a protection zone right next to some wolf spawns for training shielding.  About as handy as the wolfs out east of the White Flower Temple but there is much less lamers wandering around out here.  I've been going about 4 hours at least good without seeing a single lamer pass by to kill the monsters training my shielding, like they probably would have at white flower temple tons of times by now.  I like this spot, I'm sure there's more but this one is working fine for now.  I find it a little funny because my main reason of wanting to train is to get Axe Skill 90 so I can hunt the dragon lords in deeper Fibula with the least amount of waste imaginable.  So I think that I have pretty much moved to Fibula.  I should go walk around sometime and see who all has houses here and vip them.  It's a nice peaceful village without a lot of disturbances.  I'm digging it at the moment anyway.  So relaxing, just fishing a little here and there and surfing around on forums reading about making money in massive multiplayer online worlds .  There's a bunch of interesting theories out there.  I read some threads with people talking about what the creators running those worlds do more to stabilize those economies.  It's really interesting.  Gogo powerlevel o/

Runes of Magic - Leveling on up

     So since I last posted I've left my last guild on this game for a new one, Knightsofhonor. They seam to be a whole lot more active for they have a lot more guild members online anytime that I am on. Guild chat flourishes and they even have one of those voice chat servers that I am so prone to listening in on. I've been learning a little bit more and more on this game. A blog about it with this guy Swag who does a radio show also exists which is pretty interesting to listen to while playing. Anyway, I came on here with the interest of uploading a few screenshots at different levels in order to check out how fast my stats are going up. I am sure that to any veteran of this game they probably look terrible but I am just trying to get as high level I can as fast as I can and level 30 in about, 2 to 3 weeks? Doesn't sound like I have enough time to play, but still when I do get the chance it feels like I'm accomplishing something. Hopefully before long I can get some videos of fighting dragons on here. Until then...