Tag archive: malware

If you see a post on Facebook that claims the US just attacked Saudi Arabia and Iran, don't believe it. And please, whatever you do, don't click the link. It's just another Facebook scam, reports Graham Cluley at Sophos' Naked Security blog. This time, rather than playing on users' desire for free iPads and get-rich-quick schemes, the swindlers are exploiting fears of impending doom. The nefarious post reads:… Read More

Security firm Symantec raised eyebrows last week with a security notice about software it has dubbed Android.Counterclank, malware that the company claims can be found in over a dozen apps in the official Android market that have been installed as many as 5 million times. According to Symantec, CounterClank is a “bot-like” threat that, once installed on an Android device, can steal information and pass it along to a malicious host,… Read More

Late Monday, cybersecurity firm Dasient announced that it has been acquired by Twitter, and will be part of its “revenue engineering” team. Dasient specializes in online malware detection. In 2010, the company released the industry's first “anti-malvertising” services, which scans online advertising networks to find malicious ads. The addition of Dasient comes as Twitter gears up to roll out new types of… Read More

Security software is an everyday necessity for most people, especially Windows users, businesses, and enterprises. But one of the ironies of security software is that, once in a while, it turns out to be the source of security problems all by itself. The latest instance involves McAfee's SaaS Total Protection suite, a cloud-based solution designed to provide comprehensive email and and Web filtering along with centralized security… Read More

A new variant in the long-standing Sykipot malware family appears to have a new trick up its sleeve. According to AlienVault, instead of just launching spear-phishing email messages, the new Sykipot variant now appears to be targeting credentials of the PC/SC x509 smart cards used by the U.S. Department of Defense and a wide range of corporations and enterprises, including defense contractors. The Sykipot malware family has been around since… Read More

If you happen to be on that Facebook website, you might want to be a little more careful about the links you click. A new worm is traversing the social networking service and is called Ramnit. The worm has already laid claim to the data of at least 45,000 Facebook users. According to Seculert, which has been tracking the worm, Ramnit has mostly been focusing on users in the United Kingdom and France, but has been attacking accounts all over the… Read More

The Stuxnet worm may go down in history as one of the first known instances of cyber warfare, since it appears to have been crafted specifically to disrupt Iran's ambitions to refine weapons-grade uranium. Earlier this year, the related Duqu worm appeared—although it appears to have a different, unknown purpose. Although there has been speculation that Stuxnet and Duqu are related, Kaspersky security researcher Alexander Gostev… Read More

Google's popular Android operating system appears to still be the mobile operating system of choice for fraudsters and malware authors: Google has just pulled dozens of apps from the Android Market because they trick European users into paying premium SMS charges. According to the mobile security firm Lookout, Google has removed 22 apps from the market for essentially being wrappers around a new RuFraud threat; Lookout says they've… Read More

After five months of beta testing, Bitdefender's Mobile Security app for Android devices is officially ready for download. And it couldn't come at a better time; according to a number of recent reports, malware makers have been flooding the Android Market left and right, making it increasingly dangerous for unsuspecting users. Originally launched in June, Mobile Security has been receiving tweaks and upgrades almost constantly, but… Read More

Juniper Networks is raising eyebrows in the mobile industry this morning with a new report claiming the incidence of malware targeting Android devices has risen by 472 percent since July of this year. Presumably, that number is augmented by “hundreds” of malware samples the company uncovered in a series of third-party Russian app stores. Juniper describes the Russian malware cache as just the “tip of the iceberg,”… Read More

Companies like Google and Facebook reward hackers with monetary incentives for finding bugs and security holes in their software. Apple has taken the opposite approach. TG Daily reports that security researcher Charlie Miller was ousted from the iOS developer program after revealing a security flaw in iPhones and iPads. He discovered, and made public, that it's possible to create an app for the App Store that passes all of Apple's… Read More

According to new information from researchers at Symantec, a group of spammers have created a group of 87 spam-friendly, public URL shortening services and are actively using them to circumvent spam filters on popular sites. Using URL shortening scripts that are free and open source, the spammers are churning spam through the service and the public is also free to create links through the URL shorteners, perhaps an attempt to pass off the links… Read More

Last March, infiltrators carried out a quiet cyberattack against RSA, obtaining information about the operation of its SecurID tokens, hardware devices used by corporations, governments, and organizations to establish secure VPN connections with remote employees. RSA admitted the breach in April and began replacing SecurID tokens last June, but now RSA is revealing a bit more about the attack. Speaking at a Q&A session at the RSA… Read More

Possibly due to kids under ten running rampant with iPhones, over eighty percent of smartphone owners have no security products installed on their mobile devices according to a new study conducted by NPD. In addition, 25 percent of all smartphone owners have no idea how to install software to make smartphones more secure. However, 83 percent of respondents in the survey claimed they would take action and install a piece of security software… Read More

32-year-old Luis Mijangos was sentenced to six year in prison this week by a U.S. District Court judge in California after pleading guilty to one count of computer hacking and one count of wiretapping in March 2011. Mijangos, a resident of Santa Ana, California, worked as a freelance web designer and developer earning about $52,000 a year, but also spent his days using malware to gain access to people's computers and extorting up to… Read More