Updated: Google Talk Worm Origin Found?
Feb 25, 2009 Read/Write Web
pimg alt=”googletalklogo105-2.jpg” src=”http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/googletalklogo105-2.jpg” width=”106″ height=”58″”Hey check out this video! http://tinyurl.com/xyz,”; says an old friend by Google Talk IM. Well sure, you think, I’d love to see a video from you – it’s been a long time! Maybe you got an IM like that this afternoon, too. Maybe you got six./p
pThere’s nothing wrong with clicking on such a link, but when the site that loads as a result, Viddyho.com, asks for your Google Talk username and password in order to view the video – then you should know that trouble is afoot. Surprisingly, a whole lot of tech savvy people fell for it today. Update: The Harvard Crimson says it has unearthed the person responsible for the Viddyho worm./p
p align=”right”emSponsor/embr /a href=’http://d1.openx.org/ck.php?n=13987amp;cb=13987′ target=’_blank’img src=’http://d1.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=11205amp;cb=13987amp;n=13987′ border=’0′ alt=” align=”right” //a/p
pDaniel Carroll reported tonight a href=”http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=526749″on the Harvard Crimson newspaper’s site/a that he did a little tracing backwards, further than other reporters on the story had, and found that a San Franciscan named Hoan Ton-That appears to be responsible for the site that was harvesting the user credentials of worm victims. Ton-That’s web hosting account has been suspended, Carroll reports that he’s learned from the company. The alleged author of the worm didn’t respond to his requests for comment but has a twitter account a href=”http://twitter.com/hoan”here/a and apparently was in this author’s home town of Portland, Oregon just last week. (We were not plotting the attack together, I swear.) Ton-That’s Twitter bio reads: “Anarcho-Transexual Afro-Chicano American Feminist Studies Major” – which sounds like either an immature joke or a pretty bad ass bio to us. /p
h2The Tech Issues/h2
pWe do think there are some big issues to discuss here, too, though./p
pThe fact that many otherwise tech savvy people are falling for this trap shows that legitimate experiments in user authentication (like OpenID) still have a whole lot of explaining to do and secure APIs need more adoption. This could just as easily have been Facebook or Twitter that hijacked your Google Talk account – we give them our passwords and just trust that they won’t./p
pimg alt=”gtalkphishing.jpg” src=”http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/gtalkphishing.jpg” width=”610″ height=”482″br /
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