Are you sure your passwords are safe?

If you are using public computers it is possible that somebody maybe spying on you. In a recent visit to the headquarters of a local news paper I found that some computers has spying software installed. Are you sure your office computer is safe?

What is a Keylogger?

Keyloggers are software or hardware tools that captures or stores whatever you type on the keyboard. It captures everything including your passwords, your chat logs and whatever you typed on the keyboard. Some modern keyloggers have the ability to capture the screen as well. There are two types of keyloggers; software and hardware.

The Solution

If you have administrator rights install an anti-keylogger software to remove all keyloggers.
Alternatively you can use this tool to temporarily disable keyloggers. I also reccommend you to try these tools which are listed in wikipedia and roboform2go which is a password management tool for websites.

Confuse keyloggers when you enter a password.

Example: your password is 'thesecretpassword' .

• Type 'the' in the password box
• Click on the browser address bar or open the notepad and type something else
• Again put the focus to the password input box and type 'secret'
• Click on the browser address bar or open the notepad and type something else
• Again put the focus to the password input box and type 'pass'
• Click on the browser address bar or open the notepad and type something else
• Again put the focus to the password input box and type 'word'

The more parts you breakdown the password the better. This method is not completely safe. But it'll make it more difficult to find the password.

U.Z.A O/S Eliminator

I was infected by UZA O/S and my Antivirus Software could not detect it. It does nasty things like changing your wallpaper, disabling Taskmanager and Disabling Properties tabs.
After analyzing the activity of the U.Z.A O/S on my computer I wrote a little utility to help you remove this virus/trojan or whatever it is. Get the utility from here.. It works on Windows XP. I don't have time to write more.. Let me know of any issues. It worked for me somehow! Cheers!

Update: The Link is Fixed now!
Make sure that you disinfect all your thumb drives. This trojan spreads through removable media. As soon as you connect an infected removable media to a PC, It'll get infected.. Therefore its important that you disinfect all the thumb drives/ removable media that is used with the PCs in your office/home. If the thumb drive has an application called 'My_personal_data' which looks like a folder (its icon is the same as a default folder icon in XP), then the pen drive/removable media is infected.

Maldives Department of Meteorology website hacked!

A Turkish hacker group who call themselves ZeHiRLiYiLaN[GöLGe] hacked Maldives department of Meteorology website http://www.meteorology.gov.mv/. They replaced http://www.meteorology.gov.mv/index.html and http://www.meteorology.gov.mv/index.htm files with their own. However everything seems fine when you browse to http://www.meteorology.gov.mv/. because they failed to delete http://www.meteorology.gov.mv/default.asp which is the default. What was the purpose behind the attack? Find it out here.


Update: The site is restored now :)