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  #1  
Old July 5th, 2006, 11:13 AM
Tortanick Tortanick is offline
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Worm poses as Windows Genuine Advantage

From the news section:
Quote:
Originally Posted by CTHnews
IT security experts have warned of a worm that purports to be Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) anti-piracy tool.

WGA has recently been branded as 'spyware' in that it collects unnecessary hardware and software data from users' PCs.

The Cuebot-K worm spreads via AOL Instant Messenger, registering itself as a new system driver service called 'wgavn'. It carries the display name 'Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Notification', and runs automatically during system startup.

Users who view the list of services are told that removing or stopping the service will result in 'system instability'.
This behaves almost identically to WGA, except for the installation methods. I was wandering, is someone trying to prove the point that its ok when Microsoft dose it but otherwise its spyware.

[edit] Dose WGA warn of system instability if you try and stop it?
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Old July 5th, 2006, 05:00 PM
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Nick Grana Nick Grana is offline
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Who pushed the stupid button at Microsoft?
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  #3  
Old July 5th, 2006, 05:36 PM
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Archangel122184 Archangel122184 is offline
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Nick... that problem isn't an issue with microsoft, its with the standards for txt files.

TXT files can be encoded in EBCDIC, ASCII, Unicode, ISO standards... anything you want but there is no standard for a header to tell you what encoding is being used. So MS does so statistical analysis on the first XX bytes of the file to determine it itself. Unfortuantely, with a file that small, it often returns ASCII as unicode... heres a trick... go do the same thing, but when you save the file convert it to unicode, then reopen it.
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Old July 5th, 2006, 05:37 PM
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Archangel122184 Archangel122184 is offline
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Edit... sorry, I missed that there were a few articles there... but my comment still stands.
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  #5  
Old July 5th, 2006, 07:41 PM
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Nick Grana Nick Grana is offline
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It's alright. I really should have clarified my interest of Microsoft’s new Windows Genuine Advantage authentication software.
As for the worm, I remove AOHe!!/IM for people many times.
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