Worm Masquerades as Microsoft Antipiracy Program
W32.Cuebot-K spreads via through AIM and disguises itself as Windows Genuine Advantage on infected PCs.
Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service
Friday, June 30, 2006
Security analysts have detected a new piece of malware that appears to run as a Microsoft program used to detect unlicensed versions of its operating system.
The malware has been classified as a worm and spreads through AOL’s Instant Messenger program, said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos PLC, a security vendor.
Sophos is calling it W32.Cuebot-K, a new variation in the Cuebot family of malware.
Cuebot-K can disable other software, shut off the Windows firewall, download new malicious programs, perform basic DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks, scan local files and spawn a command prompt, Sophos said.
Article here
by certifiedbug on June 30, 2006
in Microsoft
[IP] Interesting interaction with Windows OneCare Live
A blogification of Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list
Friday, June 23, 2006
From a forwarded message to Dave Farber:
I called Microsoft support to see if there is a hidden option to say,
“yep, I’ve got updates turned to manual… it’s okay.” The rep said,
“No and why wouldn’t you want to get the latest updates to Windows.”
He told me that “in the fall, having the latest WGA will become
mandatory and if its not installed, Windows will give a 30 day
warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn’t installed, Windows
will stop working, so you might as well install WGA now.”
Windows Genuine Advantage
Misperceptions about WGA
MSDN Blog
With all of the recent interest in WGA over the past month, I wanted to take a moment to clarify a few of the misperceptions out there and hopefully bring some clarity about what the program is intended to do.
Published Friday, June 30, 2006 11:41 PM by alexkoc
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