Questões de Concurso

January 23, 2009
Worm Infects Millions of Computers Worldwide
By JOHN MARKOFF

    A new digital plague has hit the Internet, infecting millions of personal and business computers in what seems to be the first step of a multistage attack. The world’s leading computer security experts do not yet know who programmed the infection, or what the next stage will be.
    In recent weeks a worm, a malicious software program, has swept through corporate, educational and public computer networks around the world. Known as Conficker or Downandup, it is spread by a recently discovered Microsoft Windows vulnerability, by guessing network passwords and by hand-carried consumer gadgets like USB keys.
    Experts say it is the K1K1 infection since the Slammer worm exploded through the Internet in January 2003, and it may have infected as many as nine million personal computers around the world.
    Worms like Conficker not only ricochet around the Internet at lightning speed, they harness infected computers into unified systems called botnets, which can then accept programming instructions from their clandestine masters.
    Many computer users may not notice that their machines have been infected, and computer security researchers said they were waiting for the instructions to materialize, to determine what impact the botnet will have on PC users. It might operate in the background, using the infected computer to send spam or infect other computers, or it might steal the PC user’s personal information.
    Microsoft rushed an emergency patch to defend the Windows operating systems against this vulnerability in October, yet the worm has continued to spread even as the level of warnings has grown in recent weeks.
    Earlier this week, security researchers at Qualys, a Silicon Valley security firm, estimated that about 30 percent of Windows-based computers attached to the Internet remain vulnerable to infection because they have not been updated with the patch, despite the fact that it was made available in October.
    Unraveling the program has been particularly challenging because it comes with encryption mechanisms that hide its internal workings from those seeking to disable it.
    The program uses an elaborate shell-game-style technique to permit someone to command it remotely. Each day it generates a new list of 250 domain names. Instructions from any one of these domain names would be obeyed. To control the botnet, an attacker would need only to register a single domain to send instructions to the botnet globally, greatly complicating the task of law enforcement and security companies trying to intervene and block the activation of the botnet.
    Several computer security firms said that although Conficker appeared to have been written from scratch, it had parallels to the work of a suspected Eastern European criminal gang that has profited by sending programs known as “scareware” to personal computers that seem to warn users of an infection and ask for credit card numbers to pay for bogus antivirus software that actually further infects their computer.
    One intriguing clue left by the malware authors is that the first version of the program checked to see if the computer had a Ukrainian keyboard layout. If it found it had such a keyboard, it would not infect the machine, according to Phillip Porras, a security investigator at SRI International who has disassembled the program to determine how it functioned.

(Adapted from The New York Times)

January 23, 2009
Worm Infects Millions of Computers Worldwide
By JOHN MARKOFF

    A new digital plague has hit the Internet, infecting millions of personal and business computers in what seems to be the first step of a multistage attack. The world’s leading computer security experts do not yet know who programmed the infection, or what the next stage will be.
    In recent weeks a worm, a malicious software program, has swept through corporate, educational and public computer networks around the world. Known as Conficker or Downandup, it is spread by a recently discovered Microsoft Windows vulnerability, by guessing network passwords and by hand-carried consumer gadgets like USB keys.
    Experts say it is the K1K1 infection since the Slammer worm exploded through the Internet in January 2003, and it may have infected as many as nine million personal computers around the world.
    Worms like Conficker not only ricochet around the Internet at lightning speed, they harness infected computers into unified systems called botnets, which can then accept programming instructions from their clandestine masters.
    Many computer users may not notice that their machines have been infected, and computer security researchers said they were waiting for the instructions to materialize, to determine what impact the botnet will have on PC users. It might operate in the background, using the infected computer to send spam or infect other computers, or it might steal the PC user’s personal information.
    Microsoft rushed an emergency patch to defend the Windows operating systems against this vulnerability in October, yet the worm has continued to spread even as the level of warnings has grown in recent weeks.
    Earlier this week, security researchers at Qualys, a Silicon Valley security firm, estimated that about 30 percent of Windows-based computers attached to the Internet remain vulnerable to infection because they have not been updated with the patch, despite the fact that it was made available in October.
    Unraveling the program has been particularly challenging because it comes with encryption mechanisms that hide its internal workings from those seeking to disable it.
    The program uses an elaborate shell-game-style technique to permit someone to command it remotely. Each day it generates a new list of 250 domain names. Instructions from any one of these domain names would be obeyed. To control the botnet, an attacker would need only to register a single domain to send instructions to the botnet globally, greatly complicating the task of law enforcement and security companies trying to intervene and block the activation of the botnet.
    Several computer security firms said that although Conficker appeared to have been written from scratch, it had parallels to the work of a suspected Eastern European criminal gang that has profited by sending programs known as “scareware” to personal computers that seem to warn users of an infection and ask for credit card numbers to pay for bogus antivirus software that actually further infects their computer.
    One intriguing clue left by the malware authors is that the first version of the program checked to see if the computer had a Ukrainian keyboard layout. If it found it had such a keyboard, it would not infect the machine, according to Phillip Porras, a security investigator at SRI International who has disassembled the program to determine how it functioned.

(Adapted from The New York Times)

Questions 67 and 68 are about the following text:

In the World Economy, the Ditch Is Never Far Away

WHEN you see a car being driven fi rmly within its lane and well under the speed limit, there’s nothing to worry about. Or is there? If you’re David A. Rosenberg, the glass-halfempty economist, there most certainly is. He says the world economy is like that car. And where others see stability and recovery, he sees “a car being driven by a drunk, lurching from side to side on the road, narrowly avoiding the ditches each time.”

At this particular moment, he says, the car happens to be in the middle of the road. But he can’t help but ask, “Is that because the driver has sobered up, or is it because the car is just passing through the middle on its way to the ditch on the other side?” Mr. Rosenberg isn’t certain of the answer. But despite the cheer pervading the stock market and the relatively upbeat perspective of most economists, he says he isn’t convinced that the car will remain safely out of those ditches.

Formerly the chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch, and now proudly back in his native Canada as chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff in Toronto, Mr. Rosenberg writes a market newsletter that is always provocative, often cantankerous and frequently out of step with the Wall Street consensus. “I’d say I’m as pragmatic as possible and not locked into one position,” he says, “but I do understand that I have a much better record forecasting rain than in predicting the return of sunshine.”

Source: Jeff Sommer, in The New York Times, February 2, 2013 (adapted)

Questions 67 and 68 are about the following text:

In the World Economy, the Ditch Is Never Far Away

WHEN you see a car being driven fi rmly within its lane and well under the speed limit, there’s nothing to worry about. Or is there? If you’re David A. Rosenberg, the glass-halfempty economist, there most certainly is. He says the world economy is like that car. And where others see stability and recovery, he sees “a car being driven by a drunk, lurching from side to side on the road, narrowly avoiding the ditches each time.”

At this particular moment, he says, the car happens to be in the middle of the road. But he can’t help but ask, “Is that because the driver has sobered up, or is it because the car is just passing through the middle on its way to the ditch on the other side?” Mr. Rosenberg isn’t certain of the answer. But despite the cheer pervading the stock market and the relatively upbeat perspective of most economists, he says he isn’t convinced that the car will remain safely out of those ditches.

Formerly the chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch, and now proudly back in his native Canada as chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff in Toronto, Mr. Rosenberg writes a market newsletter that is always provocative, often cantankerous and frequently out of step with the Wall Street consensus. “I’d say I’m as pragmatic as possible and not locked into one position,” he says, “but I do understand that I have a much better record forecasting rain than in predicting the return of sunshine.”

Source: Jeff Sommer, in The New York Times, February 2, 2013 (adapted)

Questions 63 to 66 refer to the following text:

Where to be born in 2013

Warren Buffett, probably the world’s most successful investor, has said that anything good that happened to him could be traced back to the fact that he was born in the right country, the United States, at the right time (1930). A quarter of a century ago, when The World in 1988 lightheartedly ranked 50 countries according to where would be the best place to be born in 1988, America indeed came top. But which country will be the best for a baby born in 2013?

To answer this, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a sister company of The Economist, has this time turned deadly serious. It earnestly attempts to measure which country will provide the best opportunities for a healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead. Its qualityof-life index links the results of subjective life-satisfaction surveys—how happy people say they are—to objective determinants of the quality of life across countries. Being rich helps more than anything else, but it is not all that counts; things like crime, trust in public institutions and the health of family life matter too. In all, the index takes 11 statistically signifi cant indicators into account.

What does all this, and likely developments in the years to come, mean for where a baby might be luckiest to be born in 2013? After crunching its numbers, the EIU has Switzerland comfortably in the top spot, with Australia second. Small economies dominate the top ten. Half of these are European, but only one, the Netherlands, is from the euro zone. The Nordic countries shine, whereas the crisis-ridden south of Europe (Greece, Portugal and Spain) lags behind despite the advantage of a favourable climate. The largest European economies (Germany, France and Britain) do not do particularly well.

America, where babies will inherit the large debts of the boomer generation, languishes back in 16th place. Despite their economic dynamism, none of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) scores impressively. Among the 80 countries covered, Nigeria comes last: it is the worst place for a baby to enter the world in 2013.

Source: The Economist print edition (adapted), Nov 21, 2012.