A few light years ago 180 Solutions filed a lawsuit against ZoneAlarm. But without going into great detail it seems the lawsuit has been dropped, according to Sunbelt.

“Although the new labeling is still in our view overly aggressive, the immediate purpose of the lawsuit has been served,” said 180 chief compliance officer Ken McGraw in a statement. 180Solutions is currently facing a complaint to the FTC brought on by the Center for Democracy and Technology digital watchdog group, alleging improper business tactics.”

With this in mind, has anyone ever tested the problem that 180 Solutions mentioned in the first place? Yes someone has, and he goes by the name PaperGhost. Over at his site VitaSecurity he has tested this and named it, Take the Zone Alarm Pepsi Challenge! To quote:

“I rounded up ten people (some friends, some relatives), and sat them in front of a test box. This is where I get all MacGyver on you, because 180 Search Assistant is supposedly no longer in the wild. So, pop-quiz, hotshot…what do you do when you need to test something no longer in circulation, and the Zone Labs guys went and changed their Firewall warnings on you?”

For the answer you know what to do. Visit his site. But remember if you get attacked by the Adware guy. Do NOT blame me.

Edit – Make sure you Digg this story over at Digg.com

Remember the adverts on Photobucket. The Spyware Cleaner? That I covered here, here, and here!!! Well read this By Suzi Turner.

Rogue anti-spyware vendor Secure Computer sued by Microsoft and Washington AG by ZDNet’s Suzi Turner — Lawsuits were filed today in the Western Washington US District Court against New York based Secure Computer alleging, among other things, that their application Spyware Cleaner falsely reports spyware on users’ computers.

Read It!!!

If you’re a visitor of Secuity-Cadets you may have noticed the links to Googles Adsense or Blogwise and more. Well today I am happy to add Technorati. This is not just a link but a search feature too.

So what is it? Well it is a feature that will search for any posts that have been posted here and direct you to the Technorati web-site. So for example I typed in WMF in the searh box that is located to the right and at the bottom of all the links. This is what you will see.

What does Technorati do? When you type in for example a world leader, Tony Blair. Rather than using a well known search engine. Typing it in Technorati will direct you to what people say about Tony Blair. It will bring up x amount of blogs on that person. And bring you right to the heart of opinions that sometimes matter the most.

The main reason to why we have decided on adding this is because we want to reach out to more people out there. Spreading the word to people that may not know how to do this or that regarding Computers & Internet.

I hope you find it usefull and fun!

…by funding a new anti-spyware coalition that is on tap to launch on Jan. 25.

According to eWeek Google has joined up with Sun Microsystems. This in effect creates a place for users to go and tell and explain what dodgy pop up or what lame installation they have ran into on there computer.

“The nonprofit group is setting up shop at StopBadware.org to help computer users deal with the scourge from adware, spyware, rootkits and other malware threats.” quote eWeek.

“StopBadware.org is a “Neighborhood Watch” campaign aimed at fighting badware. We will seek to provide reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help consumers to make better choices about what they download on to their computers. We aim to become a central clearinghouse for research on badware and the bad actors who spread it, and to become a focal point for developing collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware.

Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Oxford University’s Oxford Internet Institute are leading this initiative with the support of several prominent tech companies, including Google, Lenovo, and Sun Microsystems. Consumer Reports WebWatch is serving as an unpaid special advisor.” quote StopBadware.org.

I think this is a good idea. As far as it takes off the right way. Many end users out there do not even know what malware is. So who is to think on even going to StopBadware.org. However if this brings attention to new exploits out there I am all for it. The way some malware is going we need all the information we can get. Visit it now. It is up and running.

Well after my previous post about photobucket I went back today to check. And within a minute or so I got the same advert I first reported on twice in a row when refreshing the page. The Spyware Cleaner one……Remember??? Thought so!

To add to this advert. I also got to view the same advert but on the top this time. See the below image for details.

So just to recap. After my e-mails to them. I sent another one of disagreeing with what they think of these ads. And also flooded them with info regarding Spyware Cleaner and WinFixer2006. Upto now all I got back was “Thank you for your support”. Me and my Gurus are continuing to investigate this and will report back soon!

Not suprising really. The internet search engine Google is resisting efforts by the US Department of Justice to force it to hand over data about what people are looking for.

The department wants the data to try to show in court it has the right approach in enforcing an online pornography law. For more on this, visit the BBC.

Apologies for trying to sound like a german in the title. But this is some red hot news. Read my first two posts about Photobucket, Post 1 and Post 2. Look at the pictures carefully. THEN read this.

“Dear Andrew,

Thank you for your concern. We have verified with our ad networks that there
are no ads being served that could potentially cause any harm to our users.

Thank you!

Your Photobucket Support Team”

That is the e-mail I got in return after showing them the same screenshot you can see here. Not to mention my last update full of screenshots about a different rogue application that I did not even show them.

Been one busy day at Security-Cadets. I’m of to get ze nap.

Technically this blog has been up for a month and two days. But who cares. I pride myself on stats. Because stats show how well things perform.

Traffic Summary:

Total Visitors: 571
Total Hits: 501This is from the 16th of December 2005 ’till today. Thanks for all the people that have visited this blog.

Ok. Picture this. You use a well known place to host your pictures. You are not so handy on a computer and you accidentally click on an advert. Nine times out of ten the advert will be for a car. Screensavers or for a toolbar. Well after discovering about an advert yesterday on photobucket. I went back to see if I could get that again. With no luck I did not get the same advert. So my thought was, after I got in touch with them. They may have removed the advert for Spyware Cleaner? I do not know. I am still waiting for a reply.

But the Spyware Cleaner advert is not the only malware related one on there. Up pops WinFixer2005. With fireworks included.

Most of the HijackThis logs that get posted on support forums have a winfixer infection. And with adverts like this around I am not surprised. Although WinFixer, once installed, is not hard to remove. It still is a headache for end users. The image below is what you get when you click on the advert.

So you don’t know anything about computers. Who is to think that this is rogue? No one! But let us say we did know about this and clicked on Cancel.

Ta-Daaaa. The “official of many” Winfixer web-pages appear. Just like you would get with SpyAxe/SpywareStrike. So, remember we know about this. So we click on the red-cross and get this.

Taking into account we have already clicked cancel once and clicked on the red-cross to close the window. So again we click on the red cross. And get the following.

After closing this window it finally went. So let us reflect. Photobucket is a well known hosting place with adverts coming out of your ears. Most about cars, MSN toolbar. And now the odd malicious adverts. My question is this. What are photobucket gaining out of this? Do they know what Winfixer and Spyware Remover both are? Are there more adverts like this? And finally what can we do as experts in the field to stop this?

Many questions that need an answer. Be sure to see more about this in the future as I wait for photobucket to get back to me.

When uploading a picture to photobucket I noticed a nice advertisement saying that I may be infected. The useually ones. I knew straight away what this would lead to. To a rogue anti-malware application going by the name Spyware Cleaner.

Looking at the image above that is only the start of it. When I click on the advert I get directed to an instructions page on how to download and install this application. And if you click that off, you get another pop up, like an install wizard. Unfortunatly I did not save these pages. But I have tried to get this advert back and I noticed all the adverts when you refresh the page go into a loop. And I have yet to see this advert again. I have informed photobucket about this. Hopefully they will remove it. For your information Spyware Remover is a rogue application. For more rogue ones check out SpywareWarriors rogue list.