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Hello,
Norman has done an excellent job with their report on the malware; however, it should be noted that the initial report came from ESET last week at the CARO anti-malware conference:
Targeted information stealing attacks in South Asia use email, signed binaries
I would also like to point out that while it is easy to assume that the Indian government (or someone connected with it) was responsible for these targeted attacks given the seemingly poor job in hiding their tracks (domain name registrations, embedded metadata, et cetera), it could also be a more sophisticated adversary who specifically manufactured those in an attempt to divert attention from themselves. After all, Pakistan shares borders with Afghanistan, China and Iran, and there are other countries who are likely interested as well, for geopolitical and even economic reasons.
Threat attribution is incredibly difficult, and attempts to blame India at this point may not just be foolish, but counterproductive as well.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
Yes, that's pretty much exactly what happened. John had a few other businesses he was trying at the time. This one worked out.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello Mr. McAfee,
Before you were forced to leave Belize, you were in the process of researching topical antibiotic creams. How far along was that research? Had you found any promising compounds, ready to go to trials, etc., or was still more towards the basic research end of things?
As a follow-up question, if you are able to return to Belize, will you continue this avenue of research?
I know this is kind of a two-part question, but I am hoping you'll still be able to answer.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
P.S. I do not know if you remember me, but I used to work for McAfee Associates back when you first started the company. I used to come to your house and sit at the kitchen table to do tech support over the phone. Later, I went to Colorado to work at your instant messaging company.
Hello,
It is pronounced "MACK-uh-FEE."
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
I think you are being a bit unfair here. While Mr. McAfee's ideas may see commonplace now after twenty-five years of having anti-virus software, at the time he applied them, it was quite novel. Also, the programs that Mr. McAfee was responsible for in the DOS era (SENTRY, VIRUSCAN, CLEAN-UP, VSHIELD, etc.) were pretty much state-of-the-art at that time.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
At Thursday May 02, 2013 @07:16PM, BitZtream (692029) wrote:
>
> McAfee antivirus was never particularly impressive from a technical point of view. McAfee's brightest
> moments in his career were when he basically took something known in other industries and applied
> to obvious places in computing.
>
> I don't even think the US patent office would call what he did non-trivial.
Hello,
I think continuing the rollout of Google Fiber is a good move by Google, even if it does not extend to all locations, it forces the competition to upgrade in others to prevent the threat of wholesale abandonment if/when it does arrive. Having a broadband connection connection changes not just the amount of your Internet usage, but what you use the Internet for.
I remember switching from dial-up to cable Internet access with a single-digit megabit speed back in the mid-1990s, and it opened up a whole new world of activities for me. Instead of buying retail packaged software, I could purchase and download it from the author's site. Starting a download of a video and waiting for it to complete became video streaming with services like YouTube.
I really have no idea what sort of change a gigabit Internet connection will bring, but it's just as likely to open up all sorts of new services for consumers and opportunities for revenue for software developers and content providers that were unimaginable a few years ago.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
A lucky guess.
I'm not as familiar with the remote management side of things as I used to be, but I suspect that with potentially unwanted applications (PUA), the option to use would be "delete" instead of "disinfect." The latter is really only applicable to parasitic infecting viruses which actually modify host code. In the case of a PUA, there is no clean host program inside the PUA, it's a PUA all the way down.
I would suggest checking with the LabTech or ESET support folks to verify the settings, though, as they have hands-on experience that I'm out of date with.
ESET offers a bunch of free tools. There's a whole page of Stand-alone malware removal tools that's always being updated, a free online scanner that scans and cleans malware, and my personal favorite, the system inspection tool, which is great for forensic-type activities. They're all conveniently accessible from the Utilities page, but no one seems to ever go there.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
Not sure which anti-malware software you are using, but a quick check of my employer's gave me half-a-dozen hits:
Not sure about the others, but would not be surprised if they are detected, just with a different name than you wrote. Maybe you just need to change anti-malware software, and make sure detection of Potentially Unwanted Applications is turned on on it.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
Were those the Political Opinions of America calls? If so, that's apparently a modified "boiler room" type scam where the goal is to get you to purchase a "free cruise" of the Bahamas out of Florida If you take them up on the offer, apparently you get stuck on a ferry and receive a bunch of high-pressure sales tactics to buy into a time share. Here are a couple of blog entries I wrote about them:
If you were the victim of such a scam, you might want to get in touch with this law firm who is looking into it.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
The PBS documentary sounds pretty interesting, but the history of Silicon Valley is older and more interesting than that. Professor Steve Blank is a Bay Area academic and entrepreneur who has chronicled the secret history of Silicon Valley, which dates back to electronic warfare in WW2 and moves forward from there to involve Stanford University, the Space Race, the CIA and even the California State franchise tax board (not an organization one would normally associate with any sort of progress).
Professor Blank gives an hour-long talk on the subject, which is fascinating. Here are a few links to various versions of that talk:
Extremely interesting stuff, and highly-recommend watching if you've ever wondered about why we even have computers today.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
The company Woz mentioned, Halted Specialties Company, is still around. Great source of electronics surplus and I have any fond memories of visits there over the past decades and wandering around their dusty shelves. I had no idea they were so instrumental in the founding of Apple Computer.
Regards
Aryeh Goretsky
Hello,
Probably not in the foreseeable future. Probably the next thing up is an IAmA on Reddit, I'd guess.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Someone is speaking well of you. How unusual!