Most people know by now that the Pirate Bay case concluded and found the defendants guilty. The main goal of the governments is to stop pirating and force people to purchase movies, music, and software. While this small victory scored a point for the Swedish government it is causing havoc for their lawyer.

Peter Danowsky was the lawyer for the plaintiffs in the Pirate Bay case. The attack that has been devised could potentially cause his firm to have a lot extra fees and bookkeeping work. The attack is called the DDo$ or Distributed Denial of Dollars. A site located at internetavgift.se is asking people to send 1Krona, which is about 13 cents, to the account. You might speculate this to be a good thing. They’re asking people to send them money. However the truth is that it could end up costing the firm a substantial amount of money.

This is because the bank has rules in which companies can only receive 1,000 payments a year for free. If there are payments made after that then they get charged 1.7 kronor, which is about 21 cents, for each extra transaction. That means after the 1,000 payment mark that the company would have to pay 8 cents for each payment. If that isn’t bad enough his firm might have to actually refund all of the payments because the law states that inaccurate payments must be returned if the person that sent the money claims it.

On top of the funds scheme the fact that every transaction has to be logged into the law firm books means that they will need someone to spend the time doing so.

While the site says that it has nothing to do with the case and the ruling the lawyer believes it’s the reason he’s under this attack.

Source: CNET

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As security advances so does the opposition. Many malicious software makers are starting to notice that the average PC user is becoming smarter when it comes to avoiding emails that could be potentially harmful.

Recently these malicious programmers have started to take a different path. They have begun to create different types of threats. One type that you may have already seen is where the program will inform the user needs to download security software. Three other major programs which are known as Win32/FakeXPA, Win32/FakeSecSen, and Win32/Renos have been found on millions of computers.

Attacks have also been taking place in common files such as .PDF and .DOC. Even Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 8 have had several exploits in them. While there are updates out for these programs, many users don’t update their software. For example over 90 percent of attacks in Microsoft Office have been from an exploit that could be fixed with a simple update. Surprisingly this update is over 2 years old!

While many PC users look for updates through Microsoft they rarely look to update other programs. There are a lot of PC users that believe that the Microsoft updates will solve everything. While Microsoft does run the PC business due to most users using Windows, they can’t watch over every company’s individual software issues such as the issue with Adobe.

It’s surprising how many people have issues with malicious software but do nothing to fix it. There are updates for programs coming out all the time to fix these holes and help prevent attacks however many users don’t seem to check for updates as they should. Microsoft alone last year released 78 updates that fixed 155 issues.

Therefore if you are having continuous problems with attacks you should ensure that everything on your computer is up to date. While you may update Windows constantly it’s not enough to stop someone from attacking your computer.

Source: CNET

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