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NEURO brought together over 200 people from all over Europe in February 2004 in Munich. Read the Introduction and find out what it was about or check the NEURO website, to see who was there. The NEURO video documentation offers 10 hours of panel debates for free download. |
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Since the weekend May 14th/15th, many internet users had to notice their inboxes were flooded with some rather unusual spam, carrying neofascist propaganda. Most of these spam mails are containing one or several links to web sites of the NPD, Germany's major radical right wing party, even though some mails also link to articles by the mainstream press, such as Der Spiegel, FAZ or Heise Online. The headers of the spam mails are forged, so one should not assume the sender of the spam mail to be related to the email adresses that appears - bounces show that also D-A-S-H addresses have been forged in order to send out neonazi spam.
Right now there are 72 different variations of the neonazi spam - in German and in English, as reported at GrabaGeek, many being related to the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. Another suspected reason for the spamming may be the elections Northrhine-Westfalia that are happening on Sunday. The worm's author is most likely a neofascist sympathizer and doesn't consider himself as a spammer, but is motivated by ideology instead, as pointed out in this article at Reuters.
As Heise reports, the e-mails are sent via computers infected with a bias containing a backdoor. Apparently, this seems to be the 15th version of a virus called "Sober" - now being active in version "Sober.Q" and "Sober.P". This virus has emerged in 2003 and became known lately in hiding in spam messages, promising soccer World Cup tickets and delivering the virus instead.
In general the virus is not damaging your computer, but seriously consuming bandwith and continously updating itself. After having infected a computer, the virus is contacting webservers and loading new programms, sending out emails with different messages, such as neofascist Propaganda, or even trying to take down certain websites, through Denial-of-Service-Attacks (DoS). A serious damage then happens if the virus is widespread and heavy spamming at the same time. This was the case on Monday in South African networks, where 84% of the available e-mail bandwith was used up by spam, as finance24.com reported.
To get rid of the virus is actually very easy - you only need to detect it and delete it. It is strongly suggested to update your antivirus software as soon as possible, but before Sunday, as the virus is expected to load new programms on Monday 23rd of May. According to Heise.de it is not known yet what will change in the behavior of the virus. It is possible that the message of the text will change, but it is also possible that the infected computer will be used as a bot in order to attack certain webservers. If you need help finding antivirus support, check the Anti-Virus sites of Heise.de.
It is scary that your own computer can be used on attacks like this. But it leaves to show that the computers, as with many other technologies, can be turned against you. That the Neo Nazis are using this is nothing new, a typical radical group action. But what could be more scary is what else they are doing on your computer that you do not know about.
The secret to happiness is not in doing what one likes to do, but in liking what one has to do.
Rather than the nazi-spam by itself countless bounce notifications were consuming some bandwith at the D-A-S-H servers within the last few days. We are hosting hundreds of anti-racist and anti-fascist websites, so it was a matter of course that D-A-S-H got targeted like many times before. The only difference was that the hand-made spam we know since long was upgraded to some more advanced destructivism that so far has been the more or less exclusive domain of plain porn-dealers and regular viagra-sellers.
It also appeared that the usual anti-spam tools were not really identifying the nazi-spam. At least in the beginning it got delivered to many mailboxes, since semantic spam-filters like spamassassin are trained to recognize conventional spam featuring pornography or dubios commercial offers. But it should be just a matter of time until this shit gets treated like regular junk -- help yourself by training your personal junk mail filter of your mailtool!
But imho that nazi-spam attack may also have got some good side-effect: first of all it should encourage people to leave any naive attitude towards their personal computers and the internet behind and start thinking of achieving a certain literacy towards new media as it is a matter of course in the rest of the life: instead of offering their windows machine as a free and open platform for fascist propaganda switching to a well-designed operating system like linux or any unix brand makes lots of sense and becomes an ever more political issue... and this is certainly more affordable than anti-virus software ;)