Malware with Community on the Dark Web
October 14, 2016
While Mac malware is perhaps less common than attacks designed for PC, it is not entirely absent. The Register covers this in a recent article, EasyDoc malware adds Tor backdoor to Macs for botnet control. The malware is disguised as a software application called EasyDoc Converter which is supposed to be a file converter but does not actually perform that function. Instead, it allows hackers to control the hacked mac via Tor. The details of the software are explained as follows,
The malware, dubbed Backdoor.MAC.Eleanor, sets up a hidden Tor service and PHP-capable web server on the infected computer, generating a .onion domain that the attacker can use to connect to the Mac and control it. Once installed, the malware grants full access to the file system and can run scripts given to it by its masters. Eleanor’s controllers also uses the open-source tool wacaw to take control of the infected computer’s camera. That would allow them to not only spy on the victim but also take photographs of them, opening up the possibility of blackmail.
A Computer World article on EasyDoc expands on an additional aspect of this enabled by the Dark Web. Namely, there is a Pastebin agent which takes the infected system’s .onion URL, encrypts it with an RSA public key and posts it on Pastebin where attackers can find it and use it. This certainly seems to point to the strengthening of hacking culture and community, as counterintuitive of a form of community, it may be to those on the outside.
Megan Feil, October 14, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Thunderstone Gets an Upgrade
September 1, 2016
Pokémon Go is the latest mobile gaming craze and all of the players want to have a Pikachu as their main Pokémon. Eventually players will evolve their Pikachu into the more powerful Raichu using candy and stardust, but old school Pokémon gamers know that the true way to evolve a Pikachu is with a Thunderstone. The hardest part of evolving a Pikachu, however, was finding the actual Thunderstone. Compulsive searchers have their own difficulties trying to find their information and other related content in their systems. There is a software search solution coincidentally named Thunderstone and it recently went through an upgrade: “Thunderstone Releases Version 16.”
Thunderstone’s newest release includes updates that improve search quality across the board: intranets, aggregators, and public facing Web sites. There also are more authorization options for better security, including a central authentication service and negotiate Kerberos option. Perhaps the biggest upgrade is the following:
Simplified crawl configuration
- Sitemaps allowing easier crawling of sites where URLs are not easily determined from a crawl.
- XML/XSL site support by applying stylesheets to sites that deliver content via XML and XSL instead of HTML; the searchable text is better identified.
- Proxy Auto-config (PAC) file support which makes it easier to index and crawl enterprises composed of different networks with varying proxy rules: the same config files used by browsers may now be used at crawl time.
The Ajax crawlable URL scheme from Google is supported, allowing Ajax based dynamic sites that support it to be crawled and indexed more effectively.”
Thunderstone now packs a more powerful punch for search quality and returning results. Now if only finding Cubone could be improved as well.
Whitney Grace, September 1, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google Relies on Freebase Machine ID Numbers to Label Images in Knowledge Graph
May 3, 2016
The article on Seo by the Sea titled Image Search and Trends in Google Search Using FreeBase Entity Numbers explains the transformation occurring at Google around Freebase Machine ID numbers. Image searching is a complicated business when it comes to differentiating labels. Instead of text strings, Google’s Knowledge Graph is based in Freebase entities, which are able to uniquely evaluate images- without language. The article explains with a quote from Chuck Rosenberg,
“An entity is a way to uniquely identify something in a language-independent way. In English when we encounter the word “jaguar”, it is hard to determine if it represents the animal or the car manufacturer. Entities assign a unique ID to each, removing that ambiguity, in this case “/m/0449p” for the former and “/m/012×34” for the latter.”
Metadata is wonderful stuff, isn’t it? The article concludes by crediting Barbara Starr, a co-administrator of the Lotico San Diego Semantic Web Meetup, with noticing that the Machine ID numbers assigned to Freebase entities now appear in Google Trend’s URLs. Google Trends is a public web facility that enables an exploration of the hive mind by showing what people are currently searching. The Wednesday that President Obama nominated a new Supreme Court Justice, for example, had the top search as Merrick Garland.
Chelsea Kerwin, May 3, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
IBM Provides Simple How-To Guide for Cloudant
April 24, 2015
The article titled Integrate Data with Cloudant and CouchDB NoSQL Database Using IBM InfoSphere Information Server on IBM offers a breakdown of the steps necessary to load JSON documents and attachments to Cloudant. In order to follow the steps, the article notes that you will need Cloudant, CouchDB, and IBM InfoSphere DataStage. The article concludes,
“This article provided detailed steps for loading JSON documents and attachments to Cloudant. You learned about the job design to retrieve JSON documents and attachments from Cloudant. You can modify the sample jobs to perform the same integration operations on a CouchDB database. We also covered the main features of the new REST step in InfoSphere DataStage V11.3, including reusable connection, parameterized URLs, security configuration, and request and response configurations. The JSON parser step was used in examples to parse JSON documents.”
Detailed examples with helpful images guide you through each part of the process, and it is possible to modify the examples for CouchDB. Although it may seem like a statement of the obvious the many loyal IBM users out there, perhaps there are people who still need to be told. If you are interested in learning the federation of information with a logical and simple process, use IBM.
Chelsea Kerwin, April 24, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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