Skip to main content

McAfee reverses Koobface threat warning



It turns out Koobface is washed up – not raging.
Last week, McAfee released a threat report showing samples of Koobface, the Facebook spreading worm, spiking in the Internet wild all through the first three months of 2013.
But on Friday, the anti-virus giant that's now part of Intel did a complete reversal.
In a cryptically-worded blog post , researcher Craig Schmugar notes that sample counts can be "influenced by repacking of the same underlying code . . . and other forms of server or client polymorphisms."
Schmugar confesses that "these factors led to our Koobface statisitcs being off by a large margin."
Facebook issued no public statement. But the company's PR agency contacted all the publications that ran with McAfee's initial, alarming, survey results.
Cyberattacks are real and pose tangible risk to consumers and businesses. And public awareness is not what it should be. McAfee is not alone when it comes to competitive vendors walking -- and sometime stepping over – the thin line between building public awareness and fear mongering to gin up sales. But this faux-pas hints at the competitive pressures. Schmugar's post, titled "Koobface Count Correction," did not include an apology.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Physics behind the Arc Reactor

It started with me ranting about how I should understand the physics of arc reactor more and then  Sera  needs some babel speak ideas for her Tony. I know this has been discussed deeply by most iron man fanatics before, but this is the simplified version for people who can’t be bothered to understand the big science-y words. I’m not saying that this is accurate because I’m not a nuclear engineer either, and I hope I can get some feedbacks from people who actually understand this. Since vibranium is not actually a real element, I’m focusing on the old arc reactor tech that runs on palladium. Let’s do a bit revision on fusion, yes? During nuclear fusion, light atoms combine to form heavier elements; in the process, a small fraction of mass is converted into lots of energy. Fusion reactions are called thermonuclear reactions because high temperatures are required to overcome the coloumbic repulsion between the nuclei being fused, i.e., “thermo” for the heat required...
Post a Comment
Read more

'Drone It Yourself' Lets You Create a Drone from Any Object

Have you ever wished for a flying book? A flying keyboard? Or, perhaps, a flying bodyboard? Well, it's your lucky day, because thanks to "Drone It Yourself," you can turn pretty much any object into a quadrocopter. The drone kit, created by Dutch independent designer Jasper Van Loenen, is comprised of pieces that can be 3D printed, and then clamped to any object you so desire. All that's needed are the control unit and four propellers, and then you can make virtually anything airborne. news source
Post a Comment
Read more

Meet DARPA's 6'2" disaster-response robot

At six-foot-two and 330 pounds, this hulking first responder has all the qualities you'd want in the field after a disaster:  strength, endurance and calm under pressure. Better yet, it has two sets of hands, 28 hydraulic joints, stereo cameras in its head and an onboard computer. The  ATLAS humanoid robot , which looks vaguely like something from the "Terminator" movies, was created by Boston Dynamics for DARPA, a research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense. It will compete in the  DARPA Robotics Challenge  (DRC), a competition that invites engineers to create a remotely controlled robot that can respond to natural or man-made disasters. The winning robot could be used in situations deemed too dangerous for humans, like the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The DRC is broken up into three challenges. The first was the Virtual Robotics Challenge, in which 26 teams controlled simulated, 3-D robots. Only seven of...
1 comment
Read more