Archive for January, 2010

TROJAN ALERT! Illredir-B/Illredir-C/Illredir-D

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

WARNING, PEOPLE!!! The trojans are mutating faster than we can keep up with. In one of my recent postings, I warned everyone about the Illredir-B trojan, to which Mike kindly provided a script to help us remove the trojan from our websites. In less than 2 weeks, we have been alerted that it has mutated into Illredir-C. Mike quickly modified to script to eliminate both trojans.

Today, a friend asked me to take a look at her website and Avast has detected it as Illredir-D, and when I tested Mike’s script, it wasn’t able to remove the trojan, which means it has mutated into a pattern different from the earlier two; so a further modification of the script will be needed to wipe this out.

It sounds almost like biological warfare with virus mutation.

My hat off to Avast for its quick detection, even though it is free for personal use. My AVG Free did not detect it. I’m so disappointed in it, having believed in it and recommending it to friends for the past few years.

I have also tried a few online website virus scans which were not able to detect this trojan. This is quite a worrying thought, that few antivirus programs are able to keep up with the new trojans, viruses and malware that are mushrooming more quickly than ever.

The good news is that Google is able to detect the malware, and if it has been submitted to Google webmaster, it will block access to the website upon detection of these malwares. You may come across a screenshot like the following:

Snapshot of Google blocking a website

Snapshot of Google blocking a website. I have blurred the website URL for privacy

DO NOT IGNORE THE WARNING!

To ensure your own protection, please please please get a good antivirus software!! I highly recommend Avast because even though I’m using the free licence, it is able to detect and block the trojan. Another one that is able to detect this virus (or so I’m told) is Kaspersky, but it’s not available for free download.

[Note: I hope this post will not be ripped off like the earlier post. If you wish to repost this blog entry, please include the original link to this entry which is http://www.zyenweb.com/2010/01/19/trojan-alert-illredir-billredir-cillredir-d/. Thank you.]

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Posted in Red Alert | 48 Comments »

Website Template Change (Again)

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

Hello there!

I’ve made a major change to my website template because after staring at my website for a while, I felt that the black background was rather hard to read and the text was kind of all over the place…

So I’ve made a change to this in the hope that my posts will be a lot easier to read.

I hope my hopes are not in vain! :) Feel free to give me feedback so I can work on it.

Posted in Zyenweb Updates | No Comments »

Plagiarism on the Internet

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

With the Internet booming the way it is, everything is now accessible and copy-and-pasteable. I suppose it would come to this soon enough, but it’s disheartening when it happens anyway.

My last blog post on the trojan attack was one that I wrote with a lot of thought, and with the intention of getting the word out to help people who have suffered… and I’m glad that my post did, with a lot of thanks to Mike who provided us with a very useful script to remove the trojan from our infected websites. (Thanks, Mike! You’re a life-saver!!!!)

But I didn’t realise that some people wanted to claim credit for the post that was written. Instead of providing a link to my post, someone copied the entire text word for word, and pasted it on a public forum, without giving any credit whatsoever. Not even a link to my website, or a thank-you! And the image on the forum is linked directly from my website, so I’m losing traffic bandwidth to that forum post, too. And unfortunately I forgot to watermark that image, so no one knows it was taken from my site.

This amount to plagiarism, and of course the Internet being accessible the way it is, it happens. A lot of people plagiarise other people’s work, especially students who are supposed to do research.

I’m just expressing my disappointment that someone who claims to be  a webmaster can rip off another person’s work like this. Makes you wonder about all his other posts, and his work too. I’m guessing this won’t be my last plagiarised post, as I do intend to keep writing about anything I’ve found out to help everyone else out there.

Original post: http://www.zyenweb.com/2009/12/30/trojan-attack-jsillredir-b-trj
Plagiarised post: http://www.wjunction.com/showthread.php?p=194510#post194510

I reported it to the forum moderators who were very quick to add the credits and they moved the image to another location so that my traffic bandwidth isn’t stolen. Kudos to WJunction for their quick response… but nevertheless I am still disappointed with the person who ripped my blog post off.

Posted in General Posts | No Comments »