Security firm Sophos today warned about a spyware trojan that uses a picture slideshow of a Russian beauty as a front while it steals personal information from an unsuspecting user.
The Troj/Keylog-HD trojan displays a three-photograph slideshow of a woman named "Victoria Stasova," according to a Sophos report. But the malware also steals keystrokes and confidential information from the infected PC.
A new Trojan horse making the rounds has been installing itself as a Firefox extension, according to security company McAfee.
The FormSpy Trojan attacks computers that have already been infected with the Downloader-AXM Trojan, according to a security advisory McAfee issued Tuesday in the US. Once FormSpy is executed, it installs itself as a component of the Firefox Web browser.
A new worm that already accounts for one in every 15 pieces of malicious code carries a "nuclear option" payload that corrupts data in a slew of popular file formats, a security company warned Friday.
The Nyxem.e worm, said Finnish security firm F-Secure, carries code that instructs it to replace data in files with .doc, .xls, .mdb, .mde, .ppt, .pps, .zip, .rar, .pdf, .psd, or .dmp extensions with the useless string "DATA Error [47 0F 94 93 F4 K5]" on the third of the month.
In a true twist of irony, Helsinki-based security research and software vendor F-Secure reported Wednesday that an unknown attacker has sent out thousands of emails infected with a new variant of the Breplibot worm that appeared to come from an F-Secure employee.
The emails were crafted so that they appeared to be from a non-existent employee named David Adams, Dept. Research, F-Secure Development. The emails suggested that there was a problem with the email recipient's website and attached a screen shot to illustrate.
File-encrypting Trojans are becoming so complex that the security companies could soon be powerless to reverse their effects, a new report from Kaspersky Lab has said. The report notes the rapid evolution of the public key encryption used by one family of crypto malware, Gpcode, which went from using 56-bit to 660-bit RSA in a matter of weeks.
Commonly termed "ransomware," Trojans that encrypt data files on a user's PC before demanding a payment in return for supplying the key to unlock the files, have come from nowhere in recent months to become a measurable problem.
Security researchers have discovered a new type of rootkit they believe will greatly increase the difficulty of detecting and removing malicious code.
The rootkit in question, called Backdoor.Rustock.A by Symantec and Mailbot.AZ by F-Secure, uses advanced techniques to avoid detection by most rootkit detectors.
The rootkit is "unique given the techniques it uses," Symantec?s Elia Florio wrote in a recent analysis. "It can be considered the first-born of the next generation of rootkits."
A new spam campaign that poses as a breaking news report about the death of Russian President Vladimir Putin is actually an attempt by hackers to infect computer users with a Trojan, SC Magazine online daily reports.
The spam emails have the subject line ?ATTENTION!!! President of Russia has died? and a link to more information on the subject.
Although widespread virus outbreaks may be a thing of the past, the total amount of malicious software being written is on the rise, according to McAfee Inc. On Tuesday, McAfee vendor added the 200,000th definition to its threat database, and the security vendor expects the total number of identified threats to double in another two years. McAfee's antivirus products use these definitions as digital fingerprints to determine which software should not be allowed to run on a user's PC.
Computer viruses are like real-life viruses: When they're flying around infecting every PC (or person) in sight, they're scary. But after the fact...well, they're rather interesting, albeit in a gory kind of way. With this in mind, we shamelessly present, in chronological order, the 10 most destructive viruses of all time.
Kaspersky Lab today reported a new proof of concept (PoC) cross-platform virus that creates malicious code to infect both Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Kaspersky researchers gave the crossover virus a double name, Virus.Linux.Bi.a/Virus.Win32.Bi.a.
The virus is interesting, said analysts on Kaspesky's Viruslist website, because it is capable of infecting ELF, the file format used for Linux systems, and PE, Windows' file format. It only infects files in its current directory, according to the Kaspersky report.
