(Computer) Virus from China the gift that keeps on giving

[RamboLiberal]

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

An insidious computer virus recently discovered on digital photo frames has been identified as a powerful new Trojan Horse from China that collects passwords for online games - and its designers might have larger targets in mind.

"It is a nasty worm that has a great deal of intelligence," said Brian Grayek, who heads product development at Computer Associates, a security vendor that analyzed the Trojan Horse.

The virus, which Computer Associates calls Mocmex, recognizes and blocks antivirus protection from more than 100 security vendors, as well as the security and firewall built into Microsoft Windows. It downloads files from remote locations and hides files, which it names randomly, on any PC it infects, making itself very difficult to remove. It spreads by hiding itself on photo frames and any other portable storage device that happens to be plugged into an infected PC.

The authors of the new Trojan Horse are well-funded professionals whose malware has "specific designs to capture something and not leave traces," Grayek said. "This would be a nuclear bomb" of malware.



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/15/BU47V0VOH.DTL&tsp=1

[ForeignSpectator]

1. Anyone care to explain to me why China is not perceived as a danger ...

...as the Soviet Union was? They have no morals, yet the west keeps "investing" there so they can copy all the technology. And obviously they won't pass up an oppurtunity to fuck us up or does anyone think these hackers are playing just for fun?!

[Lasher]

2. I would think thumb drives would be a more common vehicle than digital picture frames.

Lots of people use thumb drives to transfer files.

[Hekate]

3. A capitalist will sell you the rope to hang himself, said Marx (or was it Lenin)...

... and now the rope itself is made in China.

I can't tell you how scary this is.

Hekate

[ngant17]

4. for the record neither Marx or Lenin stated this

and you can look for an authentic source, only it appears to originate from rightwing sources and it is repeated so often that you'd almost think that it was true.

As cutesy as the phrase appears, it's not to be found in any collected works by Lenin, Marx, Stalin, et. al.

[acmavm]

5. Doesn't matter who said it. It happens to be the truth.

[AlertLurker]

12. Hmmmm....I have OFTEN read that it was said by BOTH Lenin and Marx.

Read Lenin: A Biography by David Shub. One of THE authoritive works on Lenin...Both quotes are contained therein. The Lenin quote (but not the Marx) is also to be found in Bertrand Russell's Power: A New Social Analysis.

Could be apocrypha (although both Shub and Russell are respected scholars), but they ring SO true, even to this day!!!

Lenin:
"When the time is right we will make great concessions and overtures of peace to the capitalists and they will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."

Marx:
"We will hang the capitalists, and they will sell us the rope to do it."

[Hekate]

23. I like your sources--thank you. My own source is my husband, who is usually accurate.

As for the naysayer above, there's nothing "cutsie" about an observation that is so patently and appallingly true.

The past 7 years have pretty much destroyed any illusions I might ever have had that capitalism is somehow allied with democracy, or that our government will inherently protect our country from the depredations of robber-baron capitalism, or that American businessmen, because they are Americans, will have the interests of the America and Americans over profit.

Mr H said it (he's the one with the MBA, not me), I didn't get it, and then thanks to 7 years of Bushco, I now get it. In spades.

Hekate

[ngant17]

27. I'd simply argue for historical accuracy that neither one made that statement

Neither Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao.

There are the Collected Works of Lenin that's published and I would dare anyone to find an authentic source in it for the "capitalist selling the rope to hang himself" statement. Soviet historians have long since discounted that statement as not factual, and it appeared to originate in rightwing US circles in the 1970's, maybe earlier.

I think Lenin did once make a statement about his support of a certain reactionary English politican this way: "I support him the same way that the noose supports the neck at the gallows". It was something close to that. I think that was the closest you'll find to such a statement. This is in the Collected Works, I believe.

There's a lot of misquotes of famous people out there, and I'd just like to keep the record straight.

[Hekate]

28. Well, enjoy yourself. I generally google to refresh my memory & maintain accuracy...

...when I post something, being a scholar myself. A quick search confirmed my recollection in this case. I have not read the works of either Marx or Lenin, though, as that is not my area, and I will have to yield to your greater expertise. >ahem<

More to the point, however, is the problem with Chinese manufacturing and our relationship to it -- wouldn't you agree?

Hekate

[ngant17]

30. About China

Over the last thirty years the Peoples Republic of China has pioneered a new path forward which allows the fullest technological potential of the capitalist stage to be achieved while using the full resources of the socialist state (police-army) to insure that the working class Party remains in power and constructs all those facets of the Socialist Stage it can – both nationally and internationally – as circumstances allow.

This partial restoration of capitalism in China comes about by necessity as it did in the Soviet Republic when Lenin restored Capitalism in 1921. Namely, the necessity of getting production up to the levels required to build the future we have in mind. That is a future NOT “to share the poverty” but “to share the wealth.”
It comes about in China in an extremely sophisticated form where the Party is constantly experimenting, testing, and examining the results of a broad-spectrum of sociocultural initiatives, great and small, within both the capitalist and socialist sectors.

[Hekate]

32. Be that as it may, I've observed the resurgance of China's instinctive merchant class with...

...great interest, but I'm still most concerned with the fate of my own country and my own people, thank you very much.

China, historically, has never been all that concerned with human rights as we understand them. The cultural context is very different, and over the past three decades our government has acted with tremendous ignorance. In its lust for unfettered trade and eagerness to support the profits of American corporations, our own government has in essence betrayed us by foregoing rigorous (or any) consumer protection regulation enforcement overseas.

We are reaping what they sowed, and it's a bitter harvest. My interest is in protecting consumers here and workers there. Heavy metals, lead and worse, are in our children's toys. Medications like heparin are adulterated and have caused deaths here. We apparantly were spared the anti-freeze in cough syrup that killed so many children in Panama, but who knows what's next. Pet food was poisoned with melamine last year and thousands of pets died. A couple of years ago three separate products (two of wood, one of plastic) that I purchased at Costco gave off such eye-searing throat-blistering fumes that I took them back. I am currently trying to return some durable medical supplies made in China to the supplier in Arizona, because there is something wrong with them.

As indicated, I am far less interested in elegant analysis of Chinese economics than I am in the health and safety of the human beings along the way. There's a level of callous indifference that's very disturbing.

This business with the Trojan Horse type programming is just the latest. Strangely enough, the stuff that's making us sick is the result of petty decisions to maximize profit, sometimes by pennies at the level of the smallest suppliers in China. Malware on this scale -- which some have seen coming -- is something else.

The Chinese are not our friends, any more than the Soviet Union was.

Hekate

[The Backlash Cometh]

6. Can someone explain how a virus or program can hide in

a portable storage device? 'Cuz, I think something is hiding in my printer driver. The printer seems to reset itself even when it's not being used, and periodically, everything gets locked up as far as internet access is concerned, almost like my anti-virus program goes into scorched earth mode because it can't control whatever is on my computer. I generally remove my anti-virus program, delete all the quarantined files, clean the computer of cookies and history, reinstall the anti-virus program and I'm humming for another month or so.

As for the chinese virus, wouldn't the answer be to find one of those infected photo frames and use it as a reverse Trojan Horse to send those "well-funded professionals" data on millions of fictitious computer users so that they can never know for sure, what information is valid and what information is useless?

[DCKit]

7. Excellent idea tBC. Bury them with useless data.

That's a trick attorneys use when they want to hide something big and ugly during discovery - a blizzard of useless documents for every snowflake of relevant information.

[The Backlash Cometh]

8. Lets hope Agent Mike is listening to pick up the trinket.

It would be swwwweeeet, if someone would start selling inoculation programs which lie in wait on your computer, waiting for these stealth virus's to appear, just so they can send all kinds of fictitious information to the hacker.

[happyslug]

20. It is all transistors, and pictures take up a huge amount of storage.

Furthermore the devices to store such pictures have to be able to process the huge number of data such pictures take up. Thus you have a very fast transfer of data, which permits fast transfer of the virus.

AS to the Virus itself, just set up a random number generator to produce false data. These are recognized by the Virus, but any anti-virus would look for the whole string. If the Virus changes the string each time it is duplicated, it will look different each time it is re-produced (Let me say, this is how AIDS works in real viruses. it changes it outside modular structure frequently and randomly. This means each change has to be meet by a new set of anti-Virus produced by the body. The body slower is defeated as AIDS changes till AIDS overwhelms the body's defenses and kills the person with AIDS).

Thus whoever did this virus may have made it hard to detect using random number generators that may be 2-3 timers (or greater) then the actual virus. The virus knows to ignore these numbers by the Anti_Virus programs do not. The Anti-Virus programs are so busy finding the destroying these random generated groups of numbers that the real virus keeps on doing its damage.

Furthermore, by storing itself on REMOVABLE storages devices, the time the Virus is exposed to anti-virus program is limited (i.e. limited to the time the device is in the computer or even limited to the time the Computer access that device).

No, I am not a computer nerd, but such a dual set of protections for the virus, could work and work well, just like AIDS among real viruses.

[The Backlash Cometh]

22. But, why not give the virus what it's looking for?

If it is set to find something on your computer, why don't we put something false there for it to pick up so it will leave your real information alone?

It's what farmers call a rabbit patch. Farmers would intentinally plant a small section of their farm where they knew they had a problem with rabbits. The hope was that the rabbits would stay on their side of the farm and leave the real crops alone.

[happyslug]

24. That is a good defense, giving the Virus wants it wants., but in an area not critical

In fact that is how many viruses are caught, By giving them false data that quickly reveals a virus is attacking AND what it wants. Best done at the entrance point, leave it eat away. The program can then have a program and anything that enters that section is a virus and stop it from going elsewhere into the program. From what I have read, many protection programs sets up such areas and detect and block such viruses. The problem is this one is going after what many consider "Safe" areas, not the Computer programs itself, but storage devices that require massive data transfer, over short time period, but otherwise off line. It is like rabbits learning to ride the tractor out to the crop and jumping off to eat, and back on to the tractor when it leaves the field to avoid any dogs or other predators left to cover the field when the tractor is gone.

[The Backlash Cometh]

25. That is one wascally wabbit!

I'm beginning to see the extent of the problem.

[leveymg]

9. What are we spending hundreds of bilions of dollars on NSA/CIA/DOD for?

It can't be impossible to determine the source of this and send them a message.

My guess, private contractors working for Chinese military intelligence. If so, tell the Chinese gov't we'll cut off imports for a fiscal quarter if it happens again. It won't.

[formercia]

10. Chinese companies as front organizations

it's well known that many Chinese 'companies' are no more than intelligence gathering fronts for the PRC.

Even if there is no useful information on a given computer, it can be effectively used as part of a bot net to take down US networks in case of a military confrontation. They have already demonstrated their capability in that regard.

[Steerpike]

11. I propose the death penalty for techs who develop spyware

With the development of bots, trojans, worms and spyware the promise of the internet has been soiled. I really hate developers and techs that create these viri etc. What a disapointment it's been to see the sophistication of all this. I had hoped that the internet would be private and anonymous. At this point nothing could be further from the truth. Big Brother is watching and listening and there is nothing you can do about it.

[Tesha]

13. (Computer photo frame) Virus from China the gift that keeps on giving

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

Virus from China the gift that keeps on giving

Deborah Gage, Chronicle Staff Writer

An insidious computer virus recently discovered on digital photo frames
has been identified as a powerful new Trojan Horse from China that collects
passwords for online games - and its designers might have larger targets
in mind.

"It is a nasty worm that has a great deal of intelligence," said Brian
Grayek, who heads product development at Computer Associates, a security
vendor that analyzed the Trojan Horse.

The virus, which Computer Associates calls Mocmex, recognizes and
blocks antivirus protection from more than 100 security vendors, as
well as the security and firewall built into Microsoft Windows. It
downloads files from remote locations and hides files, which it names
randomly, on any PC it infects, making itself very difficult to remove.
It spreads by hiding itself on photo frames and any other portable
storage device that happens to be plugged into an infected PC.

The authors of the new Trojan Horse are well-funded professionals
whose malware has "specific designs to capture something and not
leave traces," Grayek said. "This would be a nuclear bomb" of malware.

<more>

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/15/BU47V0VOH.DTL&tsp=1

[Gman]

14. IIRC, Best Buy and others refused refunds

saying it was no big deal.

[hobbit709]

15. I'd tell them I'm calling my mouthpiece.

[Steerpike]

16. The new frontier of Computers has been corrupted.

With the development of bots, trojans, worms and spyware the promise of the internet has been soiled. I really hate developers and techs that create these viri etc. What a disapointment it's been to see the sophistication of all this. I had hoped that the internet would be private and anonymous. At this point nothing could be further from the truth. Big Brother is watching and listening and there is nothing you can do about it.

[psychopomp]

31. The monolithic near-monopoly of Windows installs is the problem

Well, at least the reason that viruses can be written to propagate so quickly.

[meegbear]

17. I got one for Christmas ...

I haven't used it yet and I have a Mac, but since I wasn't planning on using it anyways, I think I'll keep it in the box.

[Tesha]

18. (Duplicate -- sorry!)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3183174

[Occulus]

19. Since we're talking about computer virii,

here's a thread from Valentine's Day in the Computer Help and Support forum. I don't think I've ever seen a better explanation anywhere on how to completely remove a computer virus from your system. This is must read information. It's lengthy, and you need to be very, very careful if you generally don't "mess around" with your operating system, but the method it describes is very thorough.

[happyslug]

21. Latin 101 is coming back to me, Virus is the proper plural for more then one Virus.

Stadia is proper Latin, Stadiums is not (Yes Stadiums is plural and I should be using are, but I am referring to the WORD Stadiums NOT to Stadiums which means I an talking about something singular which means the verb is IS), since in Latin you could have one Stadium.

On the other hand Virus is NOT singular, it is NOT plural, it is BOTH and neither. Thus if you have more than one Virus, you still have a Virus. Thus Viruses is wrong, but so is Virii. The proper plural is Virus.

People confuse latin ius, where the plural is II, with words ending in us, which are NEVER singular or Plural and thus are always ending in us.

See the following for plural of Latin words:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_of_virus

[Blue_Tires]

26. wow...wonderful stuff

[pretzel4gore]

29. this makes no sense...

why is it from 'China'? Surely China needs the US to remain ecomomically healthy; they own vast part of the national debt, treasury bonds etc- wouldn't doing such juvenile vandalism be self defeating? And the most ruthless crininals on earth operate out of the GOP hq, and the bush admin, isn't that pretty well proven? And who needs chaos in the economy, not to mention slickly manufactured accusations of gangsterism thrown at a major league player like PRC (which can hardly claim innocence-they can't even promote their good name regards the Beijing Olympic Games, it looks like)
it seems that state sponsored computer malfeasance would be ...why not physically have an agent in, say, texas, or englands, or even israel to upload the virus using local addresses? Is there any way of proving the virus wasn't designed by NSA as part of the same spiritual exercise as involving the USA in the costly, useless war against Iraq, or the ruining of the USA's good name at Gitmo and so on?
WHO has proven repeatedly that they HAte the american people? Not China, that's for sure...