Twitter As A Botnet Command Center

twitter_botnet

The folks over at Arbor Networks were browsing Twitter and discovered something very strange: a Twitter account seemingly posting gibberish. At least, that’s how it appeared at first. Upon closer investigation, they discovered that the profile was posting base64 encoded links to PKZIP archives. When they extracted the contents and unpacked the contained DLL and EXE files, they discovered that the account was posing links to malware that would post user information back to certain URLs. The article was also updated to show that the scheme wasn’t limited to Twitter, but also affected users on Jaiku and Tumblr. It’s a bit scary to see that all malware isn’t as blatantly obvious as we usually would think it to be.

Open-Frame Digital Clock

numitron22

Here’s an interesting project from several years ago. The clock design itself isn’t too noteworthy, but the construction is definitely inspired. You’ll notice that there is no breadboard or PCB, the frame actually is the circuit. The tubes he’s using are Numitron tubes,  which aren’t as high voltage as Nixies or even VFDs.  This means that there is only 12V maximum going through the exposed rails. He discusses some possible future upgrades such as LED or Nixie or VFD, but since this project is a few years old, who knows if he is still working with it.

[thanks Agent420]

SpiderBot Emulates Spider-man

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBikHgnt16E]

Spiderbot moves with four magnetic grapplers that it can launch, detach, and aim according to it’s path planning algorithm. While the robot is definitely not a final product and is quite a bit away from moving with the same grace and speed as our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, it is definitely one of the more interesting locomotion experiments out there. The video has some nice slow motion footage of the main mechanisms as well as screen captures of the path planning.

[Via BotJunkie]