When I was a kid my mom and I used to drive out to North Park Lake in western Pennsylvania and spent the evening (and sometimes most of Saturday) sitting on a bench on the shore with a tackle box, two fishing rods, and a couple of dozen nightcrawlers from the gas station at the bottom of the hill.  We never caught anything really newsworthy - at most a handful of panfish and only once a pair of rainbow trout, but we had some great times out there.  Sometimes a flock of ducks would go swimming in the lake and we'd …

As you have probably heard on the news a new beastie has been making its rounds on the Net, infiltrating Windows machines and awaiting the coming of the first of April - April Fool's Day. Unfortunately, like Y2k and the Michaelangelo virus, there is an incredible amount of misinformation out there making this worm out to be The End of the Net As We Know It - to hear some of the chatterbots talking heads, the milk in your fridge could curdle and your cat will marry your dog if your workstation gets infected. To be fair, nobody's sure of what Conflicker …

Maybe CERT-FI is following in the footsteps of US-CERT (free tip for you guys: 300 bps is obsolete!), which is why it's taken them eight months to say anything about this, but there is a particularly interesting worm that attacks Windows crawling around on the Net called Allaple-A which is remarkably subtle for an infectious agent. First of all, it's polymorphic, meaning that it rewrites parts of itself whenever it spreads, which makes it difficult for antivirus software to find and kill it. At first, it spread by bruteforcing passwords against the Radmin service and open network shares, but there …