The Roundstorm Virus/Trojan Information

It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was chilling at home with my family when I got a call from a friend saying a website was down – upon investigation something had altered one of the index.php files and it was this that was causing the site not to load.

Upon further inspection i found out that the file in question had 2 lines of text added to the bottom of it, and my findings were not good.

After a scan of that websites account, we found a lot more infected files. Oh dear.

I did some searching, and NOTHING came up on Google. Now ive been “surfing the web” for 16 years, and i’ve NEVER been unsuccessful in finding what I want on google – so it must have been BRAND NEW!

A few days later and I managed to find a blog that was discussing the virus, and also talking about the different forms/variations it came in.

After much searching, editing of files, searching, editing of files, altering the search criteria, searching, editing files – we finally have gotten rid of this crap – but it was a long process!

We think the Trojan gains passwords from Filezilla and access the sites via ftp, edit all the javascript files, all the index.html, index.php, main.php and maintenance.php files to include some javascript redirect type code.

The overall “point” of the virus is unclear, we could do with some original virus files so we can rip them to pieces and analyse what its doing.

We do think its simply a redirect virus that will try and send you to a Viagra site or something – so its not the worst thing in the world.

It does however block users from viewing your website if they have found it thru google or if they have Virus/Malware/Spyware scanners running all the time on your pc.

Need help getting dis-infected?

Call our BUG SQUASHING helpline on +44(0)1623 650 333 or send us an email!

Google’s “Caffeine” update is LIVE!

Caffeine? Aint that the stuff in my coffee? – Yes it is, but its also the nickname given to Googles updated indexing algorithm. It was first rumoured back in august of 2009 that Google would be making some fairly heavy changes to its indexing algorithm, and with the changes bought fresh hope of fairer SERP’s.

You see, the problem that we face day-in-day-out is that so many websites in the results pages do not follow the rules. There are far too many sites appearing high in Google, and yet shouldn’t be there. We are hoping that once the caffeine update has levelled out – all the erroneous results will disappear and the better sites will start ranking better.

Unsure if your website is “Caffeine Friendly” then give dijitul media a call and have a FREE on-site search engine optimisation report

Google buys its way out of another pickle – Gmail.co.uk

I was trying to think back to when i started using Gmail for the first time – i have quite a good account name,  i got it back when you had to be invited to use the system. I love how Gmail has changed the way i use email, i love how i can bolt on “labs” stuff which pushes my email forward in ways other email clients only wished they could evolve (Mail Beer Goggles?? Haha!)

Anyway – when it was launched in the UK, it was called Gmail – but as its proper launch got closer another company who had been using the term Gmail in the UK for years piped up and kicked up a bit of a fuss about it. A big lawsuit kicked off, and google ended up changing all UK sign ups to @googlemail.com email account – despite @gmail.com still working for all UK users as well!

It appeared that they had underestimated the popularity of the Gmail name!

I recently noticed that gmail.co.uk has stopped resolving the website for the contensis content management system email, and instead just shows a error page. I did a whois and suprise suprise;

Domain name:
gmail.co.uk

Registrant:
Google Inc.

I wonder how much they paid for that domain name? First registered in 1998 as well, so its not like to sat on it as soon as they heard google might be doing emails!

Seems to be the way copyright violations like this are solved in this world – buy out the competition! I wonder if they’ll do the same for Gmail.de?

Also, i wonder if i’ll soon be able to have an @gmail.co.uk email address? Now that would be awesome!