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(Left) Troy

The fable city of Troy had nine lifes, each a period of settlement built on top of the previous one.

Troy was famous for its legendary walls, built to protect the city's civilization, at the time surpassing all neighboring civilizations.

Immortalized by Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey", the city was taken not by force, but by trickery. At the end of the Trojan War, the Greeks could not break the walls of Troy; instead they build a large wooden horse and hid warriors inside. The rest of the Greek fleet sailed away, deceiving the Trojans into celebrating what they thought was their victory. The wooden horse was dragged into Troy, the warriors sneaked out at night and opened the city gate from inside.

Be alert of potential pitfalls that could interrupt your business activities.

Network: 2009-Oct-15

There are wide Streamyx service disruptions across Malaysia, causing severe slowdowns.

The problem is down to the physical layer where the DSL signal quality itself is extremely poor, causing frequent disconnects and resets. The situation is worse in Johor after a series of sudden and abnormal torrential rains.

 

Virus: 2009-Sept-29

Microsoft releases a free anti-virus software calls Microsoft Security Essentials.

Download Microsoft Security Essentials

 

Network: 2009-July-20

There are reports of Streamyx problem across JB, worst affected users would detect no DSL signal at all, while in general connection is unreliable across the board.

 

Network: 2009-May-21

Streamyx is currently haveing reliability problem, possibly due to a bad router, with an average of 20% HTTP traffic lost in transit.

The prboblem manitfests itself in the form of non-responsiveness: user who clicks on a hyperlink may only be able to successfully retrieve the page four out of five times. Even for pages that are successfully loaded, the response would be noticably sluggish since the browser will need to retry fetching about 20% of the contents.

This slowdown is more noticable if contents are retrived from overseas.

 

Virus: 2009-May-7

We have observed a new virus targetting Windows PC that is very difficult to remove.

First observed in Early-April, it has evolved and became very wide-spread.

Once infected, the virus will disable antivirus software, disable the 'Show Hidden Files' option, disable the 'Internet Options' of Internet Explorer, and replicate itself to all storage media. Exactly what it does beyond that is still a mystery.

Even if the PC is reformatted and the OS reinstalled from scratch, the PC will become infected again once the OS read any storage media that has the infected files on it, this happens with or without antivirus running. We are investigating if it is exploiting an unknown vulnerability of Windows.

Update 2009-May-19th: The virus is a poly-morphing Infostealer.Gampass or Win32.Heuristic variant, and replicates itself by redirecting autorun.inf to run itself. Once a PC is infected, the virus will morph itself and the new variant is not immediately detected as virus by most anti-virus software. Disabling Windows autorun feature or creating an autorun.inf folder in the root of removable and networked storage would help in limiting the transmission of this virus.

 

Network: 2009-Feb-25

We have observed a gradual and definite slowdown in Streamyx service over the past 3 weeks.

The slowdown was noticeable in Northern Malaysia 3 weeks ago, followed by Southern Malaysia not long after; it is now severely impacting Central Malaysia.

A number of major events were occurring concurrently: the outage of TM's DNS server, the sudden explosion of the conficker virus, and Microsoft's recent update to its .NET Framework which totaled over 300MB per PC.

The cause of the slowdown is probably a combination of the 3 factors.

 

Virus: 2009-January-20

The Conficker virus, first appeared in October 2008, has reached epidemic proportion.

Also known as Downup, Downadup, or Kido, it is a multi-vectors computer worm that deposits itself onto USB drive, network drive, and also attempts to directly infect a Windows PC via a known vulnerability.

Once infected, services that can potentially detect and remove the virus will be disabled.

It then attempts to spread itself to all local removable media, and use brute-force dictionary attack to access network shared folders.

Symptoms of infection include account policy being changed, services such as Automatic Update, Background Intelligent Transfer Service, Error Report Services, Windows Defender, Windows Secruity Center, etc. being disabled. Antivirus web sites are also not reachable.

In addition, general slow down of network performance is observed.

 

Vulnerability: 2008-Dec-15

A critial security vulnerability has been found in all versions of Internet Explorer. It allows hackers to access passwords and information store on the user's computer.

Although so far hackers have mostly been using the exploit to collect on-line games and porn sites passwords, Microsoft confirmed that the number of users that are exposed to the exploits is rising rapidly, estimated at 1.4 million potential victims.

Microsoft will release an out-of-bound emergency patch tonight. All users of Internet Explorer are advised to download and apply the patch immediately.

 

Network: 2008-Oct-4

The persistent Streamyx connectivity problem over the past two months seem to have been drastically improved. The problem also affects analog phone line, where voice call would be muted for seconds every few minutes, or dropped altogether in severe cases.

It was believed that a great number of local terminals were flooded with water (the small blue and gray Telekom metal box by the road side), deteriorating the electrical contact. As they were gradually replaced, the quality of service also improved.

 

Virus: 2008-August-8

An increasing number of Trojan attacks disguised as an image or video are targeting Taiwanese users.

The attacks come as a ZIP email attachment. The ZIP file contain a SCR or EXE file, which is actually RAR-compressed that does two things: self-decompresses to a SCR or EXE file that display a graphic file, installs a small installer that doesn't do anything.

They are extremely effective in bypassing antivirus engine, as it is not an outright virus or spyware, the installer itself stays dormant, and the image files kept changing.

If detected, Symantec engine marked these as &quo;Trojan.Packed.NsAnti&quo;, meaning that they don't know what it is, but suspect it to be malicious.

It IS malicious. Users are advised to be caution when receiving emails with attachment, especially from a purported old flame.

 

Archived Alerts

 
Alert Archive

 


Latest alerts:

Current Alert

Older alerts are available here:

 
 
     
     
Alert Policy

 


We typically only generate an alert when the threat or vulnerability is especially severe or has reached an epic proportion. These alerts therefore are not comprehensive lists of all security and virus warnings. You should, at least, evaluate these alerts and perform the relevant recommended actions accordingly.

If you came here looking for the local weather outlook, we have included them here as well for your perusal.

 
 
     
     
Advisory

 


As a rule-of-thumb, if you have anti-virus software installed, you should maintain your virus subscription and regularly update it with the latest virus definition.

To simplify maintenance, you should generally consolidate your anti-virus software to one single vendor.

 
 
     
     
Advisory

 


We have seen an alarming increased in Spyware and Adware activities, and have performed more recoveries for damages caused by these malwares than by viruses.

There are two excellent anti-spyware software that you can use: Microsoft Antispyware for Windows XP, and SpyBot Search & Destroy.

If you do not already have a good anti-spyware software installed on your system, we strongly recommend you to download and install one of the two FREE softwares mentioned above.

 
 
     
     

 

 

 

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