Mikko Hypponen
Mikko Hypponen
Mikko Hermanni Hyppönenis a computer security expert and columnist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
CountryUnited States of America
attacks buddy click dozens exploits files image messenger people seen send several since spam tries users using worm
We have seen dozens of different attacks using this vulnerability since Dec. 27. One exploits image files and tries to get users to click on them; another is an MSN Messenger worm that will send the worm to people on your buddy list, and we have seen several spam attacks.
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The United States has an unfair advantage, as most of the popular cloud services, search engines, computer and mobile operating systems or web browsers are made by U.S. companies. When the rest of the world uses the net, they are effectively using U.S.-based services, making them a legal target for U.S. intelligence.
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Nuclear scientists lost their innocence when we used the atom bomb for the very first time. So we could argue computer scientists lost their innocence in 2009 when we started using malware as an offensive attack weapon.
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If you run a Mac right now, you don't need antivirus. If you want to be safer, you should be using software that other people are not using.
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Foreigners like me have no privacy rights whatsoever. Yet we keep using U.S.-based services all the time, making us a legal target for gathering and storing our private information. Other countries do surveillance as well. But nobody has the global visibility that United States does.
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I believe in the freedom of the net, but I don't believe in the freedom of the net at the cost of having these online criminal gangs running completely loose and using the freedom of the net to steal everybody's money and take away the trust we have.
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I see beauty in the future of the Internet, but I'm worried that we might not see that. I'm worried that we are running into problems because of online crime. Online crime is the one thing that might take these things away from us.
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Otherwise, it's totally new code. But there's a common idea,
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It all comes down to whether the code ends up being shared or not. We have not seen it out on the Internet yet.
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There appears to be three different virus writing gangs turning out new worms at an alarming rate -- as if they would be competing who would build the biggest network of infected machines.
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We learned of the scanning bug in early December, but because it affected a wide range of our products, we wanted to release a fix for all (of the affected versions) at once.
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We have listed URLs that we are recommending systems administrators block. We don't recommend blocking the whole domain, as 99 percent of the pages on these free Austrian and German domains are OK. You should just block the problem URLs.
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Anonymous is like an amoeba: it's got too many different operations run by truly different people which might not share a single person with another operation, but they use the same branding - they are part of the Anonymous brand, just like al-Qaida.
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The vast majority of the online crime cases, we don't even know which continent the attacks are coming from. And even if we are able to find online criminals, quite often there is no outcome. The local police don't act, or if they do, there's not enough evidence, or for some reason we can't take them down.