sorinmustaca.com – Sorin Mustaca – personal blog. Security software, agile development, scrum, programming and more

I added a new widget on the right side of the blog which allows someone to follow my posts.

Starting as of today, I enabled the comments on my blog sorinmustaca.com . It is an experiment to see if someone really posts and to see also how much spam do I get.

I finally found some time to change the website from the old design in dark colors to a WordPress (statical) blog.

The new design is simpler and it is only on one single level.

I got rid of all the old things and left only what is relevant.

Here is the structure with links:

Home – main page

Management – will contain infos about product management and project management

About – some infos about me

Blog – link to this blog

Pets – some pictures of my favorite pets

Photography – random selection of my photos on Flickr

Reading – random selection of the books I own(and have read) from mylibrarything.com

Writing – selection and links to articles, interviews and other things I wrote

Twitter – the content of my Twitter account

Just stumbled upon this blog post from Symantec http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/spammers-introduce-new-email-internet-headers where an absolutely normal spam process is described.

Unfortunately for the author who clearly doesn’t understand Romania, he copied/pasted all headers, even those which he doesn’t understand. So, he copied all kind of bad words, things which you usually wouldn’t publish in a serious blog.

I will not publish them here because this is my blog and I respect my readers, especially in this case, the Romanian readers.

I let you alone read the funny post

Have fun !

Since I heard the first time about AMTSO (Anti Malware Testing Standards Organization), in one of the VB Conferences (I think two years ago), I asked myself whether or not this association makes sense. I’ve heard later on that Avira is also part of it.
But, I simply forgot about this issue.

I recently started to hear a lot of noise about this issue, saying that AMTSO represents only the interests of the AV Industry and not those of the user getting infected.
I don’t have yet an opinion, but as soon as I have one, I’ll post it

Here are links with PROs and CONs arguments:

PROs:

Joint Blog By amtso
http://www.avertlabs.com/research/blog/index.php/2010/07/07/testing-and-accountability/
http://community.norton.com/t5/Norton-Protection-Blog/Testing-and-Accountability/ba-p/247711
http://www.securelist.com/en/blog?weblogid=2224
http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/testing-and-accountability/
http://www.eset.com/blog/2010/07/07/testing-and-accountability
A related blog was published on the AVIEN blog

CONs:

The AMTSO Melee
Anti Malware Testing Standards Organization: a dissenting view
AMTSO: a serious attempt to clean up anti-malware testing; or just a great big con?
(please read the discussion thread there !!!)

Just have a look at the screenshot…
The problem is that they allow any registered user to post whatever he/she wants without any moderation.

This is also my post with a reply to the spammer’s post.

I received this email from a guy from GFI who contacted me on the email address published on the website.
Interesting mode to make publicity. Practically, they want me to spread the word about their company.
Cheap marketing, nothing to say.
Now, how can we differentiate between a spam and such a message ?
It is clear from the text of the email that this message was sent to a lot of users who happen to own a blog.

I am curious if anybody else received this spam.
Please let me know.

Hi,

I’m writing to you with reference to your blog, to let you know about a new type of spam which has been recently uncovered. GFI Software in fact has just announced that it is tracking a new method through which spammers send messages with MP3 attachments that contain pump-and-dump stock scams.

This news is hot off the press, and we would appreciate it greatly if you could include it in your blog, sometime in the near future as it might be of interest to your readers. A sample of this mp3 spam together with a press release can be downloaded at http://www.gfi.com/news/en/mp3spam.htm

Should you need further details on the topic in question do not hesitate to contact me.

I thank you for you time, and hope you found this piece of information useful.

Jesmond Darmanin – jdarmanin@gfi.com
GFI Software – www.gfi.com
Messaging, Content Security & Network Security Software
Tel.: +356 21382418 Fax.: +356 21382419

DISCLAIMER
The information contained in this electronic mail may be confidential or legally privileged. It is for the intended recipient(s) only. Should you receive this message in error, please notify the sender by replying to this mail. Unless expressly stated, opinions in this message are those of the individual sender and not of GFI. Unauthorized use of the contents is strictly prohibited. While all care has been taken, GFI is not responsible for the integrity of the contents of this electronic mail and any attachments included within.

This mail was checked for viruses by GFI MailSecurity. GFI also develops anti-spam software (GFI MailEssentials), a fax server (GFI FAXmaker), and network security and management software (GFI LANguard) – www.gfi.com

My old blog before moving to 1111mb.com is still online.

Click here to visit it

The provider who was hosting my blog has just dissappeared from the Internet.

It was called 1111mb.com and now the domain is available for re-registration.

Shit, I wanted to pay them to host my blog in a professional way.

Now, I am trying to find something alternative.

I will import the old posts (I have a backup ) into WordPress.com.

I will do this manually, because it is not possible to do this in another way.

My provider, 1111mb.com, which holds the blog, made an upgrade to the latest MySQL.

This killed almost all sites which use PHP+MySQL for a couple of hours

Now seems to work, but slow as hell …