Sounds like a weird advice, don’t you think?
Well, last July 4, 2007 I received an email from my best friend in Boston and the email said I had an Independence Day greeting from America. When I opened the email, it said that I need to click the link and be taken to another website where I could view the greeting card. I could have been the biggest dork on earth had I clicked the linked: a combination of four set of numbers better known as IP address! Who are they fooling? – me the IT professional? An elementary student could immediately recognize the link to be an IP address, which was a very glaring indication that there was something fishy going on
The emails contain the following subjects and people should delete them immediately:
Happy Fourth of July
Independence Day Celebration
July 4th Fireworks Show
America the Beautiful
God Bless America
Your Nations Birthday
I tried looking for information about the Trojan on Google and learned that when one clicks on the link which, as I said, comes in the IP address format, one is taken to a zombie computer that hosts the JSecard-A Trojan downloader. A code which is called Mal/Dorf-C is then immediately downloaded and installed into to the victim's computer.
These shameless, malicious spammers, who I think are not even technology savvy and are just mediocre marketing people trying to take advantage of vulnerable people, have no qualms at all at tricking people by using important events up to international stature!
For those who may not be aware, Trojans are malicious codes that install somewhere in the back of the computer without the owner's knowledge. It is actually taken from the Greek Trojan Horse which was used by soldiers to win the battle in the guise of a giant wooden horse gift but actually contained soldiers.
A perfect example of how a Trojan works is the program called "waterfalls.scr". This program deceives people by making it appear as a beautiful waterfalls screensaver, which it actually does, but in the back, the program would open some computer ports so that hackers and other evil computer people can have access to the computer's resources. This would also open to cyber thieves the private information, including credit card numbers and even passwords, of the unsuspecting computer user.
As a safeguard, we should always use the latest anti virus and other protection software and regularly get updates. A firewall is also a very important tool for one who is on the internet. My firewall always prompts me for permission for any incoming or outgoing access to the internet so I know everything that passes through my computer.
The internet is a jungle of different kinds of beast. Millions have been lost to online thief. If one is not careful, he may lose not just computer hardware by being physically damaged by malicious codes but his bank savings as well. Worse, one may be penniless on his birthday!
Showing posts with label virus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label virus. Show all posts
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Cross Learning: Biology and Information Technology
Who among us haven’t realized the existence and increasingly growing virtual world? These people must be living under a rock.
We have virtual communities where people are representing themselves as 3D images mimicking real people and their location even are virtual worlds that have supermarkets and roads and houses, etc.
Indeed, virtual worlds and universes are created, thanks to computers. Going down to microcosms, we have viruses and Trojans.
In the real world, top scientists have completed the mapping of the human DNA through the genome project. This has heightened the interest of many people to create artificial lives.
And there is David Harel from the Weizmann Institute in Israel who proposes to recreate living organism inside a computer. He wants to recreate a worm called Caenorhabditis elegans believing that this is the best example to work on being the best understood animal in the field of biology. His objective for the project is to be able to reveal how some stem cells, particularly the pluripotent, decide which specialty to take on and eventually make us understand some of the complex developments happening in nature.
And then again there is Stephen Emmott from the Microsoft Research who is thinking the other way around. Opposite to David Harel's computer trying to mimic a living organism, Emmott wants to make computers out of biological components.
Stephen Emmot and another thinker Stephen Muggleton of Imperial College, London are developing what they call an artificial scientist. This creation has been borne out of their thinking that people and other biological beings are forgetful and not very good crunching numbers compared to electronics but people and other creatures are better at reasoning. The artificial scientist would be able to do inductive logic and probabilistic reasoning. As such, these computers would really act like real scientists - they can design experiments, gather results and make theories and hypothesis. Much as I had imagined, I honestly have not come up with a picture of what an artificial scientists physically looks like. But the idea though is very enticing.
Many other researchers have taken the inner workings of biology into IT developments. Luca Cardelli who is also from Microsoft Research compares biological cells and computers and tries to discover how molecular biology wetware works in analogy to hardware or software.
Other scientists, both from Biology and Information Technology think of the spread of diseases like AIDS and malaria in terms of information systems. These are complex insights involving artificial intelligence but I think developments like these should be something people from all walks of life should support.
As information technology professionals are trying to learn more and more from how nature works through biology, we – humans, plants and animals – are supposed to be beneficiaries of these efforts. Let us just hope that all scientific projects will be geared towards increasing opportunities for work instead of increasing war weapons; finding better medical solutions instead of developing biological warfares; and healing this ailing planet instead of extracting more resources indiscriminately.
We have virtual communities where people are representing themselves as 3D images mimicking real people and their location even are virtual worlds that have supermarkets and roads and houses, etc.
Indeed, virtual worlds and universes are created, thanks to computers. Going down to microcosms, we have viruses and Trojans.
In the real world, top scientists have completed the mapping of the human DNA through the genome project. This has heightened the interest of many people to create artificial lives.
And there is David Harel from the Weizmann Institute in Israel who proposes to recreate living organism inside a computer. He wants to recreate a worm called Caenorhabditis elegans believing that this is the best example to work on being the best understood animal in the field of biology. His objective for the project is to be able to reveal how some stem cells, particularly the pluripotent, decide which specialty to take on and eventually make us understand some of the complex developments happening in nature.
And then again there is Stephen Emmott from the Microsoft Research who is thinking the other way around. Opposite to David Harel's computer trying to mimic a living organism, Emmott wants to make computers out of biological components.
Stephen Emmot and another thinker Stephen Muggleton of Imperial College, London are developing what they call an artificial scientist. This creation has been borne out of their thinking that people and other biological beings are forgetful and not very good crunching numbers compared to electronics but people and other creatures are better at reasoning. The artificial scientist would be able to do inductive logic and probabilistic reasoning. As such, these computers would really act like real scientists - they can design experiments, gather results and make theories and hypothesis. Much as I had imagined, I honestly have not come up with a picture of what an artificial scientists physically looks like. But the idea though is very enticing.
Many other researchers have taken the inner workings of biology into IT developments. Luca Cardelli who is also from Microsoft Research compares biological cells and computers and tries to discover how molecular biology wetware works in analogy to hardware or software.
Other scientists, both from Biology and Information Technology think of the spread of diseases like AIDS and malaria in terms of information systems. These are complex insights involving artificial intelligence but I think developments like these should be something people from all walks of life should support.
As information technology professionals are trying to learn more and more from how nature works through biology, we – humans, plants and animals – are supposed to be beneficiaries of these efforts. Let us just hope that all scientific projects will be geared towards increasing opportunities for work instead of increasing war weapons; finding better medical solutions instead of developing biological warfares; and healing this ailing planet instead of extracting more resources indiscriminately.
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