It has been said that the chief export of Chuck Norris is pain. Over the years many TV and movie villains have felt this pain, but the latest victims may include your router, especially if you haven’t changed its default password.

The Chuck Norris botnet was discovered by Czech researchers and spreads by taking advantage of routers and DSL modems that have not had their default passwords changed. It installs itself by guessing default administrative passwords and takes advantage of the fact that many routers are configured by default to allow remote access. If you haven’t changed your router’s default password, now might be the time. According to Computer World:

“Because the Chuck Norris botnet lives in the router’s RAM, it can be removed with a restart. Users who don’t want to be infected can mitigate the risk — the simplest way of doing this is by using a strong password on the router or modem. Users can also address the problem by keeping their firmware up-to-date and by disabling remote-access services.”

It seems that Chuck Norris remains of huge interest among the tech community. Just over a month ago, we wrote about how Facebook used to have a universal password (“Chuck Norris”) to view your profile. Now we have a Chuck Norris botnet. Something tells us that this probably isn’t the last time the tech community hears about Chuck Norris. For some humorous Chuck Norris facts, you can check out http://chucknorrisfacts.com. Some facts include:
 

• Chuck Norris counted to infinity - twice.
• Chuck Norris built a time machine and went back in time to stop the JFK assassination. As Oswald shot, Chuck Norris met all three bullets with his beard, deflecting them. JFK’s head exploded out of sheer amazement.
• Chuck Norris has already been to Mars; that’s why there are no signs of life there.
• Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.

To read more about the Chuck Norris botnet, you can see this article on the Computer World Website.

Here at Mitto we appreciate video games, and we appreciate secret passwords even more. That’s why we were intrigued by one technique used recently by EA in their ad campaign promoting newly released game, Dante’s Inferno.

Recently, if you viewed the source code of many popular social networking or gaming sites, you would see ASCII art from Dante’s Inferno, and a hidden password to be used to gain access to http://hellisnigh.com. However, in order to get access to this site, you need six passwords, each of which are hidden in the source code of different websites all across the Internet. The source of one such site, Digg.com, is pictured below.  



Most non-gamers first heard of this new video game through the commercial that was aired during the  Superbowl (shown below).


The overall PR campaign for Dante’s Inferno has definitely stirred a lot of controversy, especially among several Christian groups, because of its “hellish” themes and outrageous PR stunts (one contest challenged attendees at Comic-Con to harass their “booth babes” for a prize date with them). You can read more about the PR Campaign for Dante’s Inferno on the ars technical website.

We haven’t played or seen the game, but we did think that hiding ads on several popular websites earned EA some geek street cred.