One of the very famous websites being visited today specially in India is snaptest.org, which is actually a sister site of Symbiosis Institute Of Business Management. Symbiosis is one of the very famous b-schools of India and has developed a name for itself in last many days.

Time for entrance exam to earn a seat into the school is nearing in and in order to know the details of the exam when few of my friends visited there sister site snaptest.org there computers slowed down and also started downloading heavy content from the Internet behind the scenes without there permission. [Read more]

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Tired searching for your search queries in Google.com? No I wont ask you to start using another search engine, just use another domain “XXXDISC.NET“. SearchEngineJournal has a mention of this website xxxdisc.net which takes you to the Google homepage and you can easily do the normal searches as you perform in Google.

The search results are same and the page also looks to be almost same. The author doest not seems to run any malicious script with this page. It just seems that he used some tricky programming to get data out of Google pages and let users do Google search from his website until he actually comes up with real content for the site. And you can understand what the real content will be with that name xxxdisc.net! Even the same Google Ads are being displayed in this website as displayed in Google.com.

The only thing which makes me curious is how come Google left a hole that anyone can easily create mirrors of there search engine in any domain. I would love to hear the explanations.

Hackers who created this malware must have been very nasty else why would someone spend nights in order to create a malware which goes on to delete the computers mp3 files. Yes that is true! A recent article on computerworld suggests that the creators of this malware are more likely to be teenage mischief-makers than the organized criminal gangs we typically see authoring financially motivated malware these days.

Symantec Corp., which calls the worm W32.Deletemusic, said in an advisory that the worm copies itself to all drives on a PC. It also creates an autorun file to start itself whenever a user accesses a drive.

The worm affects PCs running Windows 2000, 95, 98, Me, NT, Server 2003, XP and Vista, Symantec said. To block potential problems users could disable the autorun feature in Windows that automatically launches programs on CDs or USB drives.

Users could also exercise caution by holding down the SHIFT for a few seconds in order to deactivate the Autorun function when they plug in USB sticks or other removable media to their computers or when they insert a disk. Users should also make regular backups for their critical data by burning DVDs or using automated backup tools.

With the increase in size of any organization the number of bugs creeping into it also increases. Bugs are not part of Microsoft only, recently softpedia came up with an article that states how few Adword clients of Google faced an unusual situation where there Adwords account was deleted without any prior notice.

“Thank you for your email. I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had trouble with your AdWords account. We’ve identified a known technical issue affecting a limited number of accounts. Our engineers are currently working to solve the problem and hope to reach a resolution shortly. Also know that I have reactivated your account,” it was mentioned in the email notification according to Search Engine Roundtable.

A few AdWords members said they were not even notified about the problems and, after several days of unavailability, the advertising platform returned to the past settings. “My account is live again. i never received any notice of what happened or even that it happened. Just logged in and the red box was gone,” Powdork, a senior member of WebmasterWorld, wrote.

This is not the first time when the search giant encounters serious glitches with the users’ accounts and accidentally removes some of them. In the past, it was reported that a lot of Gmail accounts became inaccessible as the Mountain View company disabled them due to some problems with the technology.

However, AdWords is a little bit more important for most of the customers because it works with money and some of them might be really affected by the unavailability period caused by the service’s issues.

In midst of attacks from Firefox fans Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 has another vulnerability added to its collection. Security company Secunia has discovered a flaw in IE7 which can be exploited by a malicious website to spoof the address bar, however the company rated the flaw as less critical.

The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the handling of the “document.open()” method and can be exploited to spoof the address bar if e.g. the user enters a new website manually in the address bar, which is commonly exercised as best practice.

Older versions might be also be affected but there are no reports available yet. This vulnerability is extremely important for the Redmond company as its top browser, Internet Explorer 7 is involved into the battle with Firefox and other applications for the leader position of the category.

Solution:

Close all browser windows after visiting untrusted websites.