Because ISPs are directly affected by their customers’ infected computers "running crazy" around the Internet, some providers are starting to be more aggressive in their customer relations.

Easynet, a UK Internet Service Provider (ISP), is contacting customers it believes may be infected with the Nyxem virus. When a computer is infected by Nyxem, it visits an online Web counter that counts how many PCs have been infected. Easynet is monitoring traffic to this Web counter and sending a warning to every user that visits it, explaining that their machine could be infected.

Although it seems like a nice idea, the number of new viruses and the number of infections every day suggests that an ISP can do only so much to notify and help its customers. No ISP can afford to keep a force on its payroll to react to malware attacks against its customers. While individual attacks, such asa the Nyxem virus, may deserver particular attention, this method of fighting malware is unefficient.

People who were trying to predict the success of a movie at the Sundance festival could just do a simple spam filter analysis. Unspam Technologies, based in Park City, Utah, have tweaked a spam filter and have used the results to predict (with certain success) the success of a movie.

Two of the films they selected, a documentary called "God Grew Tired of Us" and a drama called "Quinceañera" won the festival’s coveted jury prize awards Saturday night.

Here’s how Unspam did it - instead of filtering spam, they modified the filter to look for the signs of a successful film based on data from 10 years of Sundance film guides, which include descriptions of each movie, along with information found in the Internet Movie Database and box office figures.

Despite missing some movies which were successful, the spam-filtering technology (based on Bayesian classification system) may prove to be useful in other areas. Oscars, anyone?

[Via InternetNews.com -]

In a high-profile Windows Metafile attack, users visiting AMD’s website forums started receiving all kinds of anti-virus and anti-trojan notices by their security software. The reason - the forum webpages were modified to include a link to a malicious Windows Metafile image hosted on a .biz site (which are famous for their predominantly non-legitimate use.)   

While not necessarily a hacking attempt, the incident shows how recent Windows vulnerabilities can be combined with relaxed forum posting guidelines to create a wide-scale attack. Reports indicate that AMD’s forum pages have external php scripts that are loaded with the iframe tag in the webpage. One of those scripts, in turn, calls up a 16 kilobyte image called xpladv586.wmf that was being hosted at a *********[edited out].biz, which is a well-known adware site. [CNET has a screenshot]

It is interesting to follow-through on the story and see if AMD would seek any damages against the operators of the site purportedly trying to install adware.

• First, it was the consortium. Then the guidelines came.

The Anti-Spyware Coalition, having as members software and media companies such as Sun, Google, McAfee, has announced standard guidelines for defining spyware and for testing anti-spyware products.

"Few product testers currently document their test samples or methodology," the companies said in a statement. "Many use very small sample sets in their testing environments. As a result, there is no distinguishable benchmark for comparison."

While having some firm standards and benchmarks for comparison is nice, hopefully fighting spyware does not become a lower priority than creating guidelines, definitions, or otherwise red-taping the process.

[Via CNET News.com, CA -]