Category Archives: psa

G-Archiver and the Risks of Random Downloading

This is a pretty amazing story about a free utility with a malicious back-end twist.

This is so bad that I assumed it was a hoax. However, I downloaded the program, installed it (on a virtual machine), decompiled it, and verified that it is, in fact, “phoning home” with your gmail user name and password. Yikes.

The manufacturer’s page has been updated to indicate that this “was in no way intentional,” but does it really matter?

Are We Not Spam?

No, we’re not.

You may be reading this because you got a spam email from a random address at this domain. Looking at the bounce messages in my spam folder, it appears someone chose my domain and started generating random messages right around midnight last night for about an hour. This was not from me, nor any system on my network, which I have confirmed by analyzing the bounced message headers. The emails seem to originate from many different IP addresses, which would indicate that a network of compromised PCs is being used.

You should report the orginating IP address in the message header (or better yet, forward the whole, detailed email header) to your ISP’s abuse address.