Emoticons & Cyber-Threats.
Emoticons have been around since the 1st fella put a colon
:, a dash
- & a
) together forming the now copyrighted
A few years back a legit company called
IncrediMail surfaced and added a
plethora of everything you could want from moving faces to
feces to waving flags and dancing critters. They became the main-stay of POP-3 clients from
Outlook Express HTML-ized e-mails to all those IM
chatty Yahoo IM, AIM, MSN cyber add-ons. 99.9999...%
are clean and
cute, then during the years following 9/11 some
Muslim cyber geeks (probably trained at some of the western world's best colleges) started crafting some
real deadly beauties they wasted no time posting to
USENET 1st then from there they spread to all forms of chat and e-mail media. Some
are bait, they are crafted with the U.S./Brit/Frog/Auzzie
patriotic type symbols of flying eagles, fluttering flags and our forces doing the
dirty on ObL type
honey-pot traps, U see one, U want to grab it and send it to
all your M8's which was/is the idea in action. During some raids our intel/
G2 folks
have found labs set up just for that purpose. Most use the Active-X or Direct-X, Flash and/or Shockwave versions for combining active scripting of applets which contain code that makes the motion and colors but
some contain Trojans, worms, e-bombs or data-harvesters that even Trend or Symantec have not yet figured out how to I.D. let alone stop their spread. New ones surface
daily to replace the ones your anti-malware programs find & kill.
Caveat emptor SYSOPS or users, if you use them and I admit I do at times, if you haven't run the gif or ani thru something better than
Norton or freeware AVG/A-Squared, then you
do run the risk of the
very best patriotic ones available to be harvesters, back-door exploits or other forms of malware intermingled with the emoticons normal code, destructive
Visual Basic Script that makes them
SO alluring to us '
infidels', and should you grab then repost some from a domain that originates in Muslim nations or places where international standards of cyber safety
can not be enforced, or get one that came from there and ended up in an e-mail to you from a trusted M8/family member in good old US of A,
unbeknownst to all then you run the very real risk of passing some
very nasty malware onto those you care about most.
Rubbish you say, :icon_drunk: well the very worst are the harvesters, key-loggers, back-doors, not designed to do harm to a vulnerable or already contaminated system but to gather as much information
fast and send it to awaiting
al-analysts, or open ports so others can gain access and hi-jack a computer or (hitting the
al-jackpot)
an entire domain! Like the (U would a
ssume impregnable) Pentagon when they dropped their guard on 20 June 2007. The very secure DOD domain
Army Knowledge Online, a portal for U.S. Army active duty, Army-retirees, and select DOD civilians use
only, which I just happen to visit once in a while banned
all use of
Incredimail emoticons in it's
many chat rooms that fill that closed to the public
super-secure domain, but were getting flooded with some
great ones of like
ObL or
Saddam getting
whacked. Few months later
very sensitive
chit chat from those secure domains was being dug up on hard drives that some of my old units (4th and 25th ID's) found in Iraq, and
spooks like
MI5 have found in European/Asian safe-houses.
AKO plugged the holes some years back and banned the use of all but DOD authorized
very basic emoticons for use in their domains.
Whew! I have an e-mail address that ends in
*@us.army.mil and a
very limited need to know much that gives me guest access to a DOD closed domain, some of
USA Carry patrons have it too and know
exactly what goes on in those
'bitch-session' chat rooms. I have
no need to know
Jack which
as it should be for
any retiree who does not have a bona-fide need to know much & the right security clearance to enter and chat about
ongoing or future mission oriented mail posted by troops
blowing off steam or
blabbing too much as it is posted to
AKO and other
DOD closed domains 24/7/365. One unnoticed new emoticon floating around in there with say a
Hillary Clinton cut-down animated funny
may be popular but also could be a direct link to a relay net in say
Somalia! I am
not trying to be a
kill-joy here, but doing a
great job of doing
just that,
sorry USA Carry, just warning
any user of this domain and
any other that some of the
very best
'hu-rah' animated emoticons out there may be
al-Q or
organized crime used & posted by criminals whose
only desire is to gut your
$avings account before you finish reading this post and look like a normal
.dll server file during a
full systems security check. I have said
enough about a closed domain, I
will not elaborate on it more. In closing follow this
safe link to get a short recent overview from the folks who know more about this than I
ever will:
Trend © .
Link Removed
Regards,
Canis-Lupus :blow: