And that twist is that Jimmy Daniels of ReveNews had an interesting interview from an 180 insider. This coming after Wayne Porter posted an interesting article regarding a “spring clean” 180 have carried out recently.

To quote a few lines from Jimmy’s interview:

“From what I understand even the CDT recommendation to the FTC was not talked about, though they may have eventually said something that I’m not aware of. I know they didn’t talk about it the first week or two. Sometimes Edelman is talked about, but it’s usually in the tone of: ‘they’re zealots and we will never be able to change their minds, so we’re not really trying’, and ‘a lot of these people are making money off of attacking us”.

There is more:

“People looked at me like I was an idiot a couple times because I tried to be a supportive of the company and run it on both my work and home machines. I eventually had to uninstall it however, the volume of ads got a bit too high. It even boomeranged on me about two weeks after I was out of the company. The company doesn’t demand that it’s run, but obviously they want people to run it”.

I won’t post too many quotes. As you HAVE to check the article out yourself.

Full Interview here

Very interesting discussion going on over at Vitalsecurity about the new PIRT Community that got launched earlier this week.

Apparently this new community is to build a DoS community rather than a phishing one, according to Neosmart….Huh??? Yeah I agree! Total Jibber-Jabber.

Not only that, the comments section of the post is interesting too. And further discussion has made Neosmart reconsider their initial thoughts. This is PaperGhosts view on it.

All in all having Sunbelt as a sponsor will certainly not make this new venture a DoS kingdom. But an ass-kicking project. Rant over.

Comment on this over at our forum.

Just a quick post in between the security news out there. I have set up a support forum for Security-Cadets. A simple one for now. And hopefully one that expands.

I’m not set out to annoy anyone. Or prove to people I can do this or that. This is for one reason only. Like many boards out there. To make a difference and help the fight we have with Malware. And hopefully work with boards too.

The forum for now will be mainly used as an extension to this blog. Where you can discuss the issues we have. And to get help with malware. For now the “HijackThis Issues” forum is hidden. We do have a “Malware Self Help” forum set up. Tutorials will be placed there for you to use at your own risk.

We always appreciate any help you may offer. And also appreciate new members. We have a separate forum for non-malware/security related issues and much more. If you do wish to help. Register and send a PM to me or any other admin.

Click here for Security-Cadets Support

Enjoy

Offcourse I mean terminating “phishing” and not talking about the “fish” type.

CastleCops and SunBelt have announced of a new community. the Phishing Incident Reporting and Termination (PIRT) Squad. This will be a community at CastleCops solely dedicated to taking down phishing sites.

With this new service, you can report a phish via a web tool. And they aÂ’re recruiting volunteers to help, too.

Not long ago I reported on Microsoft launching legal action. For more information on this, visit the SunBelt team here.

Comment about this here.

…Thanks to Temerc.

The following files have also been identified to have this infection:-

“%SYSDIR%\dxmpp.dll
%SYSDIR%\ginuerep.dll
%SYSDIR%\dfrgsrv.exe”

And the “stickrep.dll” has been found to have a brother, with a different MD5. At the moment experts are trying to determine a possible installer.

Stay tuned for updates.

You better believe it. It is - like you can guess - part of the SpyAxe/SpywareStrike/SpyFalcon crew. I won’t link you to the posts we have here on those. There are way too many.

The .dll file this rogue application leaves is stickrep.dll, which is located in the system32 folder. So far this is in the early stages. And experts are working hard on updating fixes and what not! If any are needed. It may just be that you need to delete the .dll file and the remaining folders of SpywareQuake. Although this is not confirmed yet!

———-

UPDATE - If you have this problem with SpywareQuake. Please follow these instructions.

Tutorial at Bleeping Computer

Or…

Nick’s Computer Security blog removal instructions

Then register a complaint about this over at Malware Complaints.

Thanks to Grinler and Nick.

Way back in January I reported about the new StopBadware coalition. Well two months on and their first round of reports are out. Yesterday actually.

“After a month or so of reading feedback from users, researching what others have done, and discussing our guidelines, we’re proud to release our first round of reports, covering Kazaa, MediaPipe, SpyAxe, and Waterfalls 3.

We had many goals in writing these reports. Just to name a few: we want to shed light on bad behavior, and help well-intentioned companies improve their behavior. We also wanted to create information that would be user-friendly- written in a style and with language that would be easy for casual users to understand, so that if they found these reports from a search engine, they’d get the message easily and quickly. And we wanted to get information that would help us refine our guidelines quickly.

We’re still seeking feedback- we want pointers to programs to investigate, horror stories we can use in the media, and (now) comments directly on our reports, both so that we can find and fix problems in the reports, and so that people coming to our reports from search engines get more useful and richer information. We hope, with your help, that these will eventually be the definitive source on the web for information on these pieces of badware.”

They all consider Kazaa, MediaPipe, SpyAxe, and Waterfalls 3 to be badware. Already knowing Kazaa is bad from way before I got involved with the forums. My question is this.

Why report on known “badware”? Well Suzi Turner blogged about this which you can read here. Interesting read actually. Not long after that article, Luis from stopbadware replied with this, Is StopBadware.org Newsworthy?

Time will only tell if this will work. As long as the people involved with badware get caught. And we as anti-malware fighters work together. That is all the matters.

Something comical really. You all know by now about the MalwareComplaints forum that gets end users to file a complaint about rogue vendors they have had trouble with.

Well here is something to chuckle at. Type in “winantiviruspro” into Google. And this is what you will get.

“First result: The rogue vendors web-site.”

“Second result: The forum collecting complaints about this vendor.”

Sometimes theirs pain. Then sometimes there are moments like this to treasure.