Some of the most dangerous cyberattacks are the least visible ones.
Widespread worms, viruses or Trojan horses spammed to millions of mailboxes are typically not a grave concern anymore, security experts said at the Virus Bulletin conference in Canada last week. Instead, especially for organisations, targeted Trojan horses have become the nightmare scenario, they said.
Metropolitan Police have revealed that the Trojan responsible for infecting thousands of users is Haxdoor, a particularly 'nasty' piece of malware. The FBI is working with the Met to catch the offenders. The Metropolitan Police have revealed that cybercriminals used a particularly malicious piece of malware called the Haxdoor Trojan to steal data from thousands of UK users.
Over 2,300 people have been infected with a variant of Haxdoor, which installs a backdoor, keylogger and rootkit on infected machines, to harvest private information undetected.
A new version of the Stration worm has been engineered to infect computers by posing as a computer update, a security vendor has warned.
Sophos said that its latest reports showed that Stratio-AN is "rapidly spreading".
"The Stratio-AN worm has been aggressively distributed by its author since the early hours of Monday morning," said the firm in a statement. "It spreads via email using a variety of disguises, including an example which ironically poses as a warning that the recipient's computer is infected by a worm."
AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) has become an integral way for students to communicate on campus. Before I enrolled at UConn a couple of years ago I had never touched AIM, but now I find myself signed on almost all day, everyday. I have had relatively few problems with the program until a couple of days ago when I accidentally downloaded an AIM virus.
Samsung's US Web site is hosting a Trojan horse that logs keystrokes, disables antivirus applications and steals online banking access codes, according to Internet security firm Websense.
Visitors to the Web site are not affected by the malware and Websense believes Samsung's Web server has most likely been compromised in order to serve malware to users that receive spam messages or malicious IM messages.
According to an advisory published by Websense on Friday, "The server appears to have been compromised and has been hosting a variety of files for some time".
Internet pedophile Adrian Ringland forced a Canadian schoolgirl to send him explicit photographs of herself, after infecting her computer with a Trojan Backdoor.
The accused contacted the victim over a chatroom posing as a teenager. Few days later he sent her a file claiming to be his photograph, which in fact contained a Trojan Backdoor and no sooner the girl downloaded and opened the file than the attacker gained control of the victim's computer via IRC channels. Thereafter the man allegedly threatened and blackmailed the victim, forcing her into submission and abuse.
Netsky-P led the top 10 chart for malicious software threats in August, retaining its rank despite the availability of fixes for more than two years.
During August, Netsky-P accounted for 19.9 percent of all malicious software incidents reported, according to a report released Friday by security researcher Sophos. Netsky-P, which remains the most widely spread of the e-mail worms, was ranked the worst virus of 2004.
Brain, the first PC virus, which appeared 20 years ago, is very different from today?s batch of viruses and worms.
Like many of the first-generation viruses that appeared, it was generally seen as just a nuisance.
Its creators, two Pakistani brothers, used the program as a piece of true viral marketing, advertising their company, Brain Computer Services of Lahore, Pakistan, by flashing the message: ?Beware of this VIRUS... Contact us for vaccination,? on the screen of infected machines.
SECURITY OUTFIT Symantec has discovered a proof of concept virus that targets AMD processors rather than operating systems.
There are two versions of the worm, one aims at 32-bit and the other at 64-bit AMD processors. Symantec has called them "virus w32.bounds" and "w64.bounds".
Online gaming buffs could be at heightened risk for attack, McAfee has warned, after Avert Labs received several worms implemented in the "Lua" scripting language used mostly in gaming codes.
The language, which was first released in 1994, is widely used for the popular "World of Warcraft," "Garry's Mod," "Illarion" and "Escape from Monkey Island" games, as well as a list of others.
McAfee also said this week that the Lua worms appear to be targeting each other, and were written to find and target other Lua worms.
