Hackers are using increasingly sophisticated methods to ensure that the malware they develop is hard to detect and remove from infected systems, security researchers warned at this week's Computer Security Institute (CSI) trade show. The most popular of these approaches involve code mutation techniques designed to evade detection by signature-based malware blocking tools, code fragmentation that makes removal harder, and code concealment via rootkits.
Google Inc. accidentally sent out e-mail containing a mass mailing worm to about 50,000 members of an e-mail discussion list focused on its Google Video Blog, the company said Tuesday.
"On Tuesday evening, three posts were made to the Google Video Blog-group that should not have been posted," Google said in a statement, posted late Tuesday night.
A worm posing as several fake breaking news stories, including the death of US president George W Bush, has been spammed to email recipients in a worldwide campaign, it was reported today.
On the day when the Republican administration faced disappointing results in the US mid-term elections, the Dref-N worm attaches itself to emails with subject lines such as ?White House news' and ?Incredible news', and attempts to entice email users into clicking on a malicious attachment, claiming to include details of a major news story.
Gone are the days when an enterprise ? or any user of a PC connected to the internet ? could install a straightforward antivirus (AV) solution on each machine, and sit back safe from attacks.
If you're a write-in candidate without major political party recognition, there's nothing quite like mysterious malicious software radiating from your Web site to earn you a little extra publicity.
That's what happened this week to Ted and Fran Gianoutsos, a husband-wife team running for governor and lieutenant governor, respectively, in Alaska's race.
Malicious remote control software continues to be one of the biggest threats to Windows PCs, according to a new Microsoft security report.
More than 43,000 new variants of such insidious software were found in the first half of 2006, making them the most active category of malicious software, Microsoft said in a Security Intelligence Report published on Monday. In June Microsoft also flagged zombies as the most prevalent threat to Windows PCs.
Researchers at IT security vendor Sophos today warned of new spyware Trojan horse that promises racy pictures of the teenage Russian pop group t.A.T.u. as a means to entice e-mail users to click on a malicious attachment.
Security vendor Sophos claims that presently Apple is not displaying the correct name for the recently discovered iPod Windows virus listed on its website, instead referring to it by the name of a file commonly used in malware called RavMonE.exe. The virus, which was been shipped on a relatively small number of Video iPods sold in stores from mid-September, does not affect Apple Macs but propagates through storage devices connected to Windows machines.
McDonalds had McEgg all over its McFace when it was discovered people who ate at the company's outlets in Japan risked a Big Mac Infection.
MP3 players the company was offering as prizes as part of a joint Coca-Cola promo, "were loaded with a particularly nasty strain of malware," says The Register.
Users who connected their McDonalds MP3 players to their Windows PCs, "were exposed to spyware code programmed to transmit their web passwords and other sensitive information to hackers," says the story.
A backdoor trojan is using short message service (SMS) text messages to relay stolen information back to malicious users, according to one anti-virus vendor's research wing.
Similar malware usually employs email to relay the stolen information, according to researchers at McAfee Avert Labs.
McAfee said last week that the malware is a variant of the W32/backdoor-DJC trojan.
Jimmy Shah said on the McAfee Avert Labs blog that malicious hackers are concentrating on recently accepted ways of transmitting information.
