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Google search your way in city

April 16, 2010 Leave a comment

All you need to know is where you are and which place you want to reach and Google maps will find the way for you. Not just this. The search engine will also tell you the place from where you can catch a public transport, the distance to be travelled, time required and expenditure for the trip. Already available in Delhi, such a facility may soon come to Chandigarh.

On Thursday, Jagjeet Chawla, product manager, Google India, said, “It will be easier to do it for Chandigarh as it is a well-planned city. Google maps have covered most places in India and road directions are already available to guide vehicles. For enabling maps to tell about public transport, we need schedules and routes from the government.”

Google is learned to have requested the central government to provide data of various public transport systems that can be mapped, like Delhi, where, for instance, if you wish to take the tube from Rajouri Garden to Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station Gate No 2, you must just enter your location and destination on Google map. In a few seconds, the engine will tell you that your journey will take 45 minutes, location of Metro station, frequency of tube on the route and nearby taxi stand.

Watch Out for Trojans Circulating in PDFs

April 16, 2010 Leave a comment


Websense Security Labs warns of Zbot campaign; an information stealing trojan

That PDF File You Are Storing Can be Dangerous

New Zbot campaign comes in a PDF

Websense Security Labs has received several reports of a Zbot trojan campaign spreading via email that connects your PC to a malicious remote server in China. They have seen over 2,200 messages so far.

Zbot (also known as Zeus) is an information stealing trojan (infostealer) collecting confidential data from each infected computer. The main vector for spreading Zbot is a spam campaign where recipients are tricked into opening infected attachments on their computer.

This new variant uses a malicious PDF file which contains the threat as an embedded file. When recipients open the PDF, it asks to save a PDF file called Royal_Mail_Delivery_Notice.pdf. The user assumes that the file is just a PDF, and therefore safe to store on the local computer. The file, however, is really a Windows executable. The malicious PDF launches the dropped file, taking control of the computer. At the time of writing, this file has a 20 perecnt anti-virus detection rate (SHA1 : f1ff07104b7c6a08e06bededd57789e776098b1f).

Location of the Zbot:

The Zbot trojan creates a subdirectory under %SYSTEM32% with the name “lowsec” and drops the “local.ds” and “user.ds” files. The “local.ds” and “user.ds”  are configuration files for the threat. It also drops an executable “sdra64.exe” and modifies the registry entry “%SOFTWARE%\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Userinit” to launch itself during system startup. When it runs, it injects malicious code into the Winlogon.exe instance in memory. This Zbot variant connects to malicious remote sever in China using an IP address of 59.44.[removed].[removed]:6010.
This is yet another hacking attempt pointing to China, which is kinda alarming and makes one wonder if China is quietly planning to go big on this. Make sure you’ve updated your anti-virus suites with latest definitions in order to keep your PC from malicious data. Also, avoid downloading any PDF from unknown senders.