A few minutes ago, while checking out (a nameless person)s thread, I got some strange activity on my browser. Then, while responding to a post in WC, I noticed yet more weird stuff. I have found a foreign program in my system that somehow installed itself at just about the same time,…I don’t know anything for sure, but I checked out the program, and it is evil. It did have an uninstall, which I ran. The program is called ‘newdotnet’. I suggest doing a search on all machines to see if anyone else here picked up this nasty little program.
Just did a little more research on newnet. It is indeed a self installing program. and a menace. In fact they are getting the pants sued off of them to the tune of 7 million dollars for their foibles.
No, but strangely, Norton firewall and anti virus does not recognize it as a virus. Usually, I get an alert when anything tries to tap in or out. Not with this though. I just tried A2957s thread again, and I got the weird dialog box, that freezes the browser, until I hit ‘ok’, and then redirects to a commercial site. very weird. I checked for the program again though, after clicking out of it really fast, and nothing this time.
Update 5/6/03: New.net has filed a lawsuit against the authors of at least one well-known pest-removal product for removing its software, and hints of more to follow. The suit seeks to force them to remove New.net from their detection database, in addition to unspecified damages in excess of $75,000.
Perhaps this explains why Norton does not recognize it?
No, norton doesn’t recognize it because its spyware, not a virus. I remember now. My brother has had it before, and my parents have as well. You may want to double check to make sure you’ve gotten rid of it, and then go and get a spyware removal tool like AdAware.
I recommend a program calld “Surfin’Guard” from Finjan Software. It’s a free “beta” but woks fine. It will monitor all active content and provides a “kill” function that will stop active content. It will also prevent Web pages from writing to your registry it’s suprising how many try to. They treat it like is some kind of cookie jar that you can’t delete.
It also provides a “sandbox” you can run downloaded executables in. A few months ago I dl’d a game and when I went to play it Surfin’ Guard caught it trying to access my anti-viral definitions, I’m sure it saved me a headache there.
I consider this to be essential surfin’ gear, right alongside Norton AV and Zone Alarm, as it catches a lot of the stuff the others don’t, including some new viruses that your anti viral doesn’t have definitions for yet.
After all, Windows needs all the 3rd party security you can find as it has virtually no security of it’s own. :<
I just spent some time checking out this things after it made me curious. The company and those who run it are a bunch of morons. I was looking through their forums, and found this:
Then I started looking around other forums where people have complained about the newdotnet being spyware and a virus… and sure enough, a newdotnet support person shows up and hassles the forum. They come in and post stuff like “…you shouldn’t listen to other people’s advice because it will likely harm your comptuer…”
If any of these people show up here… let 'em have it :x
And newdotnet people… if you’re reading this, make sure you read this carefully… YOU SUCK, YOUR SOFTWARE SUCKS, IT IS NOTHING BUT SPYWARE, and if any body asks I will gladly help them remove it.
Now go ahead… take care of me why don’t ya… losers!!! 8)
You can patch IE all you want. I suspect that it will always be insecure. All of my machines (home and work) run Mozilla the open source browser. It isn’t subject to these sort of integrated Windows scripting attacks. And you get tabbed browsing. Check it out if you haven’t.
i’m certainly no fan of microsoft, and will be checking out (and probably using!) mozilla…
but I wonder whether the reason explorer is insecure is because everyone uses it and so it’s a worthwhile target for exploitation? there’s no point targeting a piece of software where most users are pretty knowledgable people.
I am curious though: are there features which make mozilla more secure than explorer? I mean, if you use explorer with the proper settings, is mozilla still more secure?
I think the problem with IE is that MS tried very hard to integrate it seemlessly into Windows. That’s fantastic from a speed point of view, and IE is very fast, but it turns out that allowing your browser all kinds of system level access leaves you open to all kinds of attacks. An up-to-date-patched, high-security invoked IE should be safe, but it seems that the next little speed-optimized backdoor exploit is always just around the corner. Did they really squash that last bug this time?
Mozilla, on the other hand, was not designed like this. Their big push has been for speed, because they never had the low-level security-hole-inducing access to the OS that MS did when they were writing IE. Mozilla’s speed is very good now, and if you have the 20MB of RAM to spare, the quickstart option is very nice. BTW, I use the client that comes with it, too. Nary a viral scripting attack has succeeded through my email.
Hehe, maybe we should trash newdotnet until a support person shows up, and then muzzle him. heh, and if any newdot geek is reading this,…I come from a family FULL of lawyers, SO BRING IT on!
<<EDIT>>
These people remind me of the Church of Scientology (Dianetics) who, if you trash their organization, they sick their squadron of jack-booted lawyers on your ass. What a bunch of losers. :-?
heh, and if any newdot geek is reading this,…I come from a family FULL of lawyers, SO BRING IT on! 