I am abit late on this one, and I am not into Twitter, and tweeting and all this business, but thought it was a worthwhile post.
Its seems that Twitter has become victim of a rather nasty worm, its self replicating and has been flooding the site with posts. The posts resulted in making other viewers accounts being infected, and also looking to get users to visit StalkDaily.com. Over 10,000 posts were generated by the worm, so this must have given the admins something to do over the easter weekend, I am sure they would have preferred an easter egg hunt 
The general word is that people are once again concern around the security of twitter and the teams ability to respond and get ontop of these sort of security incidents.
As ever with any social sites of these type, you just need to use common sense and remain vigilant.
So, April 1st came and went, but now we are seeing a little more conficker activity. Reports have given some details that this variant is only programmed to operate upto the 3rd May 09, so who knows what happens after that.
What is now being seen though, is that if you are subjected to the latest E variant you could be infected with an anti-malware bit of code called “SpywareProtect2009″. If this is then activated, you will kindly be asked to cough up $49.95 to clean false infections on your machine, and not the real ones you would like to be cleaning up in the first place.
Today on 14th April 2009, Microsoft have ended mainstream support for the Microsoft XP Operating System.
Microsoft have announced they will continue to provide free security fixes until 2014, but platform bugs and fixes will only be available to paying customers.
This is interesting with over 60% of the worlds Internet computers running XP. For me the real concern is how MS will clasify what is a security fix, and what is a bug etc.
I do think that most people should have been looking to move to newer OS’s like Vista, but we know organisations are slow to move, and I am sure still many running instances of NT and 98 so we know its a slllllooooowwww uptake.
Check the Microsoft Support Lifecycle
So its appears the US powe grid has been hacked, and is vulnerable, and apparently they have known about it for years.
So the question has to be why has no one done anything about it?
The scary thing is the US are supposed to be rolling out this new funky technology to all homes, to electronically control and manage power delivery. How long will it be until little hackers are turning of grannys electricity, or the whole of the US just for a laugh.
Just a super quick post, I just came across this standalone and network tool from BitDefender, I have not had a chance to look at it myself yet, but it might be worth putting in your Conficker toolkit for later use.
Downadup (or Conficker) is a network worm that takes advantage of vulnerabilities in Windows to spread. Its removal is complicated by the fact that it blocks many known antivirus software and associated websites.
BitDefender Labs has detected a new and more aggressive Downadup version. It spreads using a Windows RPC Server Service vulnerability and is called Win32.Worm.Downadup.Gen.
The new version is more resilient to disinfection. Once the system is compromised, the worm disables Windows Update and blocks access to most of the anti-virus websites in order to hinder the user to disinfect his machine.
BitDefender is the first to offer a free tool which disinfects all versions of Downadup. This domain is the first to serve a removal tool without being blocked by the e-threat.
The worm itself is not new, it made its first appearance late November 2008, known under the names Conficker or Kido as well exploiting the vulnerability described in the Microsoft security bulletin MS08-067. After successful exploitation it used to install rogue security software on the infected machine.
