US-CERT is aware of public reports of malicious code circulating via spam email messages related to the Israel/Hamas conflict in Gaza.

These messages may contain factual information about the conflict and appear to come from CNN. Additionally, the messages indicate that additional news coverage of the conflict can be viewed by following a link provided in the email body. If users click on this link, they are redirected to a bogus CNN website that appears to contain a video.

Users who attempt to view this video will be prompted to update to a new version of Adobe Flash Player in order to view the video. This update is not a legitimate Adobe Flash Player update; it is malicious code. If users download this executable file, malicious code may be installed on their systems.

This spam is canned.

Immediately after McColo was unplugged, security companies charted a precipitous drop in spam volumes worldwide. E-mail security firm IronPort said spam levels fell by roughly 66 percent as of Tuesday evening.

Spamcop.net, another spam watch dog, found a similar decline, from about 40 spam e-mails per second to around 10 per second. (See their graphic representation here.)

(via memeorandum)
This is undoubtedly good!

More Spam is canned – and sold!

Through war and recession, Americans have turned to the glistening canned product from Hormel as a way to save money while still putting something that resembles meat on the table. Now, in a sign of the times, it is happening again, and Hormel is cranking out as much Spam as its workers can produce.

In a factory that abuts Interstate 90, two shifts of workers have been making Spam seven days a week since July, and they have been told that the relentless work schedule will continue indefinitely.

(via memeorandum)

But is this a good sign or a bad one?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

Any tips on how to rebuild my inbox? I’ve been regularly deleting and compacting and transferring, but of course, it had a huge number of messages. I’m a packrat, and email makes me an e-packrat.

It errored out before deleting all my messages, so I’m wondering where they’re hiding. I also seem to have duplicate folders, one dated january 2006 and one dated today, so I don’t think that fits under their duplicate-folder error. I tried rebuilding the index. No luck. I tried deleting inbox.msf. No luck.

The files are there. Inbox has 79 megs in it. But inbox.msf is 2k. Something’s wrong.

Anyone have any ideas?

Izzadin Kassam’s site displayed a blank white screen and Hebrew text notifying of a technical error.

The websites of Arab Israeli political party Balad, and left-wing activist groups ‘Hagada Hasmolanit’ and ‘Occupation’ featured a black background with an Israeli flag, and the emblem of the ‘Extremist Zealots’ group, similar to that of Meir Kahane’s Kach movement.

The lyrics from the Israeli national anthem ‘Hatikva’ were also posted on the sites in Hebrew, as well as pictures of Palestinian babies dressed as suicide bombers with the caption, ‘Murderers from Birth.’

Pictures at the link.

Ynet doesn’t label the kids right-wing, and talked to some of the hackers, who don’t sound nearly as scary as the JPost is making them out. (The JPost is going Ha’aretz on us? WTF?)

“The criteria are defined as anti-Zionist or anti-Jewish sites that support or assist in harming Zionism and the existence of Israel as a Zionistic, Jewish state”.

According to him, the group consists of young adults from 16 to 18 years of age.

In addition to the Hamas military wing’s site, they also broke into the Balad political party site, that of the Hagada Hasmalit (the left bank), the Kibush (occupation) site and more.

[...] Despite the fact that the slogan, “Kahane was right” appears and with it, the symbol of the Kach party, a yellow and black fist, the groups’ members clarified that they are in no way connected to the Kahane Chai party, “except for many common opinions and agreement with Kahane’s ways, out of the understanding that there is no other choice.”

Fanat al-Radical is a new group of hackers whose members were members of another group called Kamikaz Team. “Since we didn’t want to include politics in Kamikaz, we created a parallel group that supports the destruction of Arab sites.

I actually don’t care what their politics are. I wish them success in hacking all the anti-Israel sites they can find.

I did nothing.

The wrappers are back on Hot Air, and since I didn’t get around to recreating my Firefox profiles, well, I did nothing.

It wasn’t working yesterday. It’s working now.

Go figure.

Score another one in my continuing list of “Why computers will NEVER take over the earth a la Colossus and Skynet.”

I installed it earlier this week, then got really tired of having to pick and choose what sites I would let show scripts, so I uninstalled it. Now it doesn’t show the proper display for Hot Air, and only Hot Air. The javascript wrapper is completely gone; only the raw (and ugly) html is displayed.

For the hell of it, I tried reinstalling and uninstalling it. No dice.

Anyone? I’m pretty sure there’s something resident in Firefox from the NoScript installation, but I don’t know where to begin to look. I’m using the latest release, 2.0.0.14.

I can pretty much recover the data I need for work, but I’m going to lose all of the photos I took since last June, since I’ve been lax transferring them to CDs. That means all of my final Tig photos are gone.

Is there anyone out there who knows of a good data recovery place that might be able to pull the data off for less than I’ve been quoted?

Islamic Jihad operatives have been able to hack into several Israeli websites, the London-based Arabic-language newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat reported Sunday.

“The electronic surveillance unit of the media warfare division has been able to hack into several Israeli websites and take them over,” said a statement by the al-Quds Brigades, quoted by the paper.

Wow, that’ sounds pretty scary. What websites did they hack? IAF? IDF? Mossad?

A Ynet probe has revealed at least two websites hacked by the Islamic Jihad – the Kfar Truman and the “High-Tech Motors Body-Shop” websites.

The next sound you hear will be the sound of millions of true hackers around the world snorting with derision. Oooh. A body shop website. The world trembles at the loss of yet another scratch-and-dent repair website, so vital to Israeli security.

And here’s where Roee gets that Juvenile Scorn apprenticeship:

Website defacement of this nature requires only basic programming know-how and usually boils down to changing the main page – a file easy to reconstruct.

[...] A statement by any terror group pointing to a unit dedicated to defacing websites does not necessarily indicate any operational sophistication, since any teenager with basic programming skills can do the same.

[Snicker]

Well done, Roee.

First report: A new system deployed by the IDF in the Gaza-region enables soldiers stationed in the operations room to fire at Palestinian terrorists near the Gaza fence, Ynet has learned.

The systems, which are equipped with a camera and a machine gun, enable soldiers to watch any activity that takes place near the fence and if necessary to fire at the push of a button. The new system will soon be officially declared “operational.”

Do you think they’re going to call it Skynet? But wait, here’s more about the bloodthirsty Zionists, who want only to destroy the Palestinians:

“The system is not supposed to replace soldiers on the ground, and it won’t replace the need to charge at terrorists when necessary,” an IDF official said.

“We will be able to distinguish between terrorists and innocent civilians,” another military official said. “We won’t fire needlessly, yet at the same time we are responsible for protecting IDF soldiers.”

Damn ruthless Zionists. Pure evil, I tell you. Evil!

Admiral Hopper was known for many things including writing the programming language COBOL. She also found the first computer bug. (Go to the bottom of the page.)

Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1945. The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, with the entry: “First actual case of bug being found”. They put out the word that they had “debugged” the machine, thus introducing the term “debugging a computer program”. In 1988, the log, with the moth still taped by the entry, was in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Computer Museum at Dahlgren, Virginia

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.