Tag archive: Graham Cluley

As detailed by a Sophos Security post earlier today, the IT security blog conducted a poll of over 4,000 Facebook users in order to determine a general consensus regarding Facebook's new Timeline feature rolling out to profiles over the next few weeks. Over 50 percent of respondents claimed to be worried about Facebook Timeline and an additional 32 percent responded “I don't know why I'm still on Facebook.” Only 8… Read More

The Daily Express has claimed that hackers known as Team Elite have infiltrated the MI5 site, altering it so "the identity of visitors could be stolen and viruses downloaded on to their machines." According to the newspaper, Conservative MP Patrick Mercer said: "Having potentially highly classified information available to hackers is deeply concerning. The identity of agents and informers in terror groups such as Al Qaeda… Read More

You thought your Mac was safe? It is – relatively – but not absolutely, as more malware to attacks Macs is coming into play. The latest entrants are OSX/Tored-A – an updated version of the Mac OS Tored worm – and a Trojan called OSX/Jahlav-C, both of which have been discovered on popular porn sites. Users are as to download a "missing Video ActiveX Object" – which of course turns out to be a virus.… Read More

You used to be able to rely on Western Union just for sending money. Now, however, if you receive a notification that there’s a money transfer you haven’t collected, there’s a very good chance it’s malware, according to security company Sophos, which has picked up a crop of spam mails supposedly originating from Western Union. The mail purports to inform you of a money transfer that you’ve never collected,… Read More

Doubtless you spent yesterday celebrating the birthday of spam. Yes, it was May 1, 1978 when Gary Thuerk of DEC spent the first spam e-mail on the Internet’s ancestor, Arpanet. But securitycompany Sophos thinks that three decades is long enough, and has begun Spam Pledge to try and eradicate spam. Good luckon that.   "Gary Thuerk could never have imagined what he was starting when he sent that mass email 30 years ago,"… Read More

Remember back in the good old days when viruses floated around on floppy discs? Or, more recently, when your biggest threat of having a worm take over your computer was using Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Outlook email program, knowing that even if you dutifully downloaded the latest updates, you could never quite be sure you were safe? Well, malware writers have been expanding their horizons, and any software application with a… Read More

Although the motivation for the attack remains unknown, early Tuesday attackers launched a distributed denial-of-service attack against the Internet's core DNS servers, which are ultimately responsible for converting human-friendly site names (like www.digitaltrends.com) to IP numbers (like 209.85.60.103) which computers, routers, and software uses behind the scenes. Think of DNS as the ever-updating address book for the millions of… Read More

It might be a backhanded endorsement, but it's sure to raise some eyebrows just the same: in its latest security report, computer security firm Sophos says home users should consider switching to Apple's Macintosh platform simply because it's not vulnerable to te swarms of Trojans and other malware affecting Windows, and, so far, has attracted little malware of its own. The Sophos Security Threat Management Report… Read More

New analysis from Internet security firm Sophos shows the United States is still the leading source of email spam, but that China isn't far behind and, as a whole, Asia is the worst spam-relaying continent. Sophos scanned all spam messages trapped by the company's worldwide network and analyzed the messages' points of origin. Some 23.1 percent of spam still comes from computers located in the United States—which,… Read More

The worm is particularly difficult to root out because it lands in e-mail boxes using a number of different subject lines such as “re:details” or “re:here is the document.” “It arrives with an attached pif file (program information file) and it's already extremely widespread,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos Plc. Read more at CNN.com.

From the Sophos press release: Sophos has published a report into the countries from which spam messages originate. Researchers scanned all spam messages received over two days last week and have revealed a 'dirty dozen' of offending countries with the United States topping the chart. The 'dirty dozen' are as follows: United States Canada China (& Hong Kong) South Korea… Read More

Sophos virus experts have an interesting theory on a peculiar payload of the W32/Doomjuice-A worm. The Doomjuice worm drops a copy of the prevalent W32/MyDoom-A's source code onto infected computers, possibly in an attempt to make it more difficult to convict the true author. The Doomjuice worm drops a compressed copy of MyDoom's C source code into a number of directories on the infected user's PC. Detectives… Read More