Instant Messaging Vulnerable To New Smiley Attacks 170
titus writes "Security researchers Yoann Guillot and Julien Tinnes have found a way to encode malicious code into smileys and provided a proof of concept encoder to automate the process. The researchers said their discovery paves the way for IM malware that would be impossible to detect since the malicious code would be 'indistinguishable from genuine chat messages.' I've tested the proof of concept code which works very well. Time to panic?"
:(){ :|:& };: anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
There, punch that into your terminal and see the poweer of the smiley.
Re:obligatory xkcd (Score:3, Informative)
It's a basilisk [wikipedia.org].
Yawn.... (Score:1, Informative)
I'm getting really bored at all these silly April 1st stories.
I think for a little excitement I should go and punch Cowboy Neal in the face and kick him in the nutsack too.
Now don't you think that would be funny?
Re:Stop. Really, just stop (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot is operational 364 days a year.
actually 364.24222 days a year .. and you call yourself a nerd?
While this may well be a joke... (Score:5, Informative)
...in reality there are 3rd party smiley add-ons that work with IM software. You can recognize them by the "Your buddy sent you a smiley, to see it you need to install X software" type of IMs.
That software is not exactly good for your computer either.
For example: http://emoticons.smileycentral.com/yahoo-smileys.jsp [smileycentral.com]
And its EULA http://helpint.mywebsearch.com/intlinfo/eula/eula.jhtml [mywebsearch.com]
Choice quotes from EULA
UNIFIED REGISTRATION: As a service to our users, we may consolidate registration data for Webfetti, My Fun Cards, Kazulah, Smiley Central and certain other specified websites, services or applications accessible via the Toolbar, so that users are only required to provide registration information once, and would then be able to use the same unique ID and password to access all such websites, services or applications.
Passwords. In order to access certain services, you may be required to accept additional terms and conditions and/or establish an account including an unique ID and password
After reading that EULA, which references a bunch of other EULAs... that's enough to send my head spinning.
Re:Virus Smiles!?! (Score:4, Informative)
It is not wise to post such things... there are people who actually would paste that into a terminal despite your warning.
The way it works is as follows: :(){ something } # this is a valid function declaration which does something
program1|program2 # this runs both program1 and program2, and pipes the output of one to the other
command& # this runs a command in the background (i.e. non-blocking)
; # this is a line break
: # this is a valid function call
So, it makes a recursive function which calls itself twice from within the body of the code. Since it calls itself non-blocking, there is no infinite recursion error. On the next line, it calls the function.
So, each parent function call spawns two children, and each child spawns two children, et cetera. This can easily bring down a system that is not securely configured (that is, most systems).