HackNBlog @ Salamanteri Server

I found out just now that Debian, along with couple other major distributions, have decided to drop support for XMMS audio player (See: Considerations for ‘xmms’ removal from Debian). I was really badly surprised when I noticed that apparently dist-upgrading my Debian from Etch to Lenny, the new stable, the old XMMS package had disapeared! I can live with Debian dropping XMMS but I think that it’s a bit shameless to put an upgrade out that drops the already installed package from my system too! So I had to get it back…

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On August 20th, 2008 I wrote a post to warn about New MySpace&Facebook Malware.

Now there seems to be a similiar new case in Facebook. It seems like te send a fake message from one of your friends showing your firends name and picture and a link to a video. Opening link seems like YouTube but has a message in middle of screen telling that you need to install new version or Adobe Flash Player.

Cliking on install will however not update Flash but instead instead a new version of Koobface worm. This worm is also spread on MySpace and, unlike the last one I posted about, on Friendster.

Koobface will let black hats to run commands on infected computers. Naturally this will only be a problem for Windows users as the worm cant infect other OS’s but according to stast of my blog quite a few visitors I get are using a Windows system so I decided it to be best to warn people again.

There is more information about this on security site TrendMicro and on F-Secure Malware Information Pages.

There are many reasons why a user might want to use OpenDNS quality dns nameservers instead of service providers dns servers. Maybe the providers nameserver does not work that well, or maybe your country and/or provider is one of those who have set up domain name based internet content filtering that you want to pass - this is the case here in Finland where the claimed use is to prevent access to child porn sites but most of the sites filtered are not of that sort at all, many not even regular porn sites and sometimes there have been really bad mistakes (like w3c site ending on the list).

On opendns.org there is a simple guide on how to set Linux (there is one for Windows too) to use OpenDNS - all you have to do, according to the site, is to edit /etc/resolv.conf and replace IP’s on nameserver lines with ones of OpenDNS. While this works at least on Fedora (and supposedly on most other flawors of Linux), at least with Debian and Ubuntu there is an extra step. This one is for those using cable connection with DHCP:

1st. edit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and add followind line to end of file:
prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222,208.67.220.220;
…then find the line starting with “request” that lists the information to read ask from DHCP server and remove the option “domain-name-servers“.

2nd. edit /etc/resolv.conf like instructed on opendns.org. Replace the nameserver lines with these:
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220
edit: I’m not sure if the second step is needed or even effective on debian.

3rd. Now you could just wait until the information from DHCP gets renewed or to make the changes work instantly you can run:
/etc/init.d/networking restart

Notes: You need to get root access to edit the files and to restart networking.