F-Secure & Kaspersky April Fools’ Security: From huge hack to malware written by aliens

You know the web is saturated with pranks to celebrate April Fools’ Day, and you expect it from Google and ThinkGeek, but this year F-Secure and Kaspersky dabbled in the fun.

F-Secure: Hackers change 3 million passwords

Mikko Hypponen, CRO at F-Secure, wrote:

Passwords from over 3,000,000 user accounts were apparently set to “password” late last night in a wide-spread hack that affected hundreds of news, retail and Web 2.0 sites. Most affected users are completely unaware of the attack.

According to current statistics, 62% of affected users would not notice such a change as their password was already “password”.

F-Secure claimed a hacker group named “Obvious” took credit for the hack and uploaded a 1.9 GB file to The Pirate Bay that contains over 3 million user names and the one password. “To avoid problems like this in the future, we are recommending users to change their password everywhere to ‘password1,’ which is obviously more secure.”

Kaspersky delivered a double-whammy.

Mother-SCADA

Eugene Kaspersky announced that in the course of analyzing SCADA security:

We came across “Mother-SCADA”, the chief, predominant, all-powerful ICS of the whole world, on whose smooth and uninterrupted operation relies literally everything on the planet: from how breakfast tastes and the size of annual bonuses, to the hours of night and day time and how fast the sun and the stars move across the skies.

Yep, we’ve gone and found the SCADA that manages all the technological processes in the Matrix!

Of course, since this morning’s discovery, protecting Matrix SCADA is now the single most important task facing us all today, since control of the “upper level of reality” has the trickle-down effect of ensuring computer security in our projected world. Today, we managed only to plug into Mother-SCADA and conduct preliminary analysis of the system. Critical vulnerabilities so far haven’t been found, but the architecture of the system doesn’t permit a 100% guarantee of its security, even though it’s built on an unknown branch of UNIX. We also attempted analysis of the security of its PLC (programmable logic controllers); however, alas, we weren’t able to determine the manufacturer.

Malware written by ET

Shortly thereafter, Kaspersky reported on another mind-blowing “malware-monster” discovery. This time, Kaspersky warned readers to sit down before announcing, “I’d say it’s theoretically impossible to say that this code was written by a human being (glad to be seated now?).”

This code is so infernally intricate that I fear this newly-discovered worm must have extraterrestrial origins.

…

Most of the infections were detected on computers of scientists of the Russian Academy of Sciences returning from their field investigations into the meteor in Chelyabinsk!!

Kaspersky then allegedly quoted these Russian scientists:

All known computer malware was created by human beings. But what we’ve got here is a new form of digital essence: Alien computer life infiltrating Earth – specifically, its Internet – via meteoroids, which clearly represents a momentous historic event. Without doubt, it confirms the theory of the initial duality of biological life on Earth – one part of which came about of its own accord, the other part – implanted from without, from space. Thus, we can deduce that today on Earth there simultaneously exist, not two, but three parallel forms of bio-life: terrestrial, extraterrestrial, and also hybrid.

Kaspersky said the underwater and underground worlds also pose as “other possible sources of threats,” so the security firm has organized an expedition to the violently erupting Tolbachik volcano “to find computer maliciousness at the very hottest point of the world’s surface.”

Gmail Blue

Those pranks practically make some of Google’s pale in comparison. For example, Google must want in on Microsoft’s Windows Blue action, since it announced Gmail Blue, which is “Gmail – only bluer.”  

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