If you find yourself living in the USA, are the age of majority, and have registered to vote.  Get out and do it today :-)

But first, be sure to Vote for Five Nerds right here on Tumblr:

http://www.tumblr.com/directory/recommend/tech/fivenerds

Remember, a vote for Five Nerds is a vote for nerdiness!

This message is approved by Five Nerds.

Reblogged from Gary Warner CyberCrime & Doing Time

“(Famous person) died” spam
According to my spam inbox, today was a horrible day to be a celebrity:

Alicia Keys died
Angelina Jolie died
Beyonce Knowles died
Bon Jovi died
Brad Pitt died
Cameron Diaz died
David Beckham died
Gwen Stefani died
J.K. Rowling died
Jay-Z died
Jennifer Aniston died
Jennifer Lopez died
Johnny Depp died
Justin Timberlake died
Kanye West died
Madonna died
Miley Cyrus died
Nicole Kidman died
Oprah Winfrey died
Ronaldinho died
Tiger Woods died
Tom Cruise died

In the UAB Spam Data Mine we received between 450 and 539 copies of each of these spam messages.

The body of the email has the same text for each, with only the name varying. The name used in the body of the email doesn’t necessarily match the name in the subject line. Here’s an example:

Cameron Diaz died along with 34 other people when the Air Force CT-43 “Bobcat” passenger plane carrying the group on a trip crashed into a mountainside while approaching the Dubrovnik airport in Croatia during heavy rain and poor visibility.

Please see attachment

The attachment is called “News.html” is “base64” encoded, but if you click on it, it will launch in a web browser.

The HTML is composed of javascript functions which takes substrings of pieces of code and composes them together to make a URL:

new String(“hre3y9b”.substr(0,3)+”hv5f5hv”.substr(3,1))]=
new String(“http:P5v”.substr(0,5)+ “//panHSOY”.substr(0,5)+
“3aPiplusP3a”.substr(3,5) + “.com.V4Hq”.substr(0,5)+
“mx/1.0Xq”.substr(0,5) + “HFkhtmlFHk”.substr(3,4))

So, the “hre3y9b” becomes “hre” the “hv5f5hv” becomes an “f” for “href” etc …

It eventually turns into:

hxxp://paniplus.com.mx/1.html

(the “xx” instead of “tt” is to prevent this from being live)

That page has two URLs on it, one pointing to the free domain website ‘cz.cc’:

cetogilco.cz.cc / scanner10 / ?afid=24

This page goes to a fake anti-virus site …

The second URL points to:

analyticspool.in / wiki / index.php ?sid=151 &search=ecard &refresh=on

From cetogilco.cz.cc the file “antivirus.exe” is downloaded.

A VirusTotal Report for this malware, showing 18 of 41 detects, is available. The MD5 is cb38da67e9a96afb0b3674eddee26472.