A new trojan is making its rounds on the Internet, freezing up victims' computers and then demanding a ransom be paid through Western Union. Called "ransomware," the viruses have been around in Russia for several months, but the first English variants appeared in March.
Mobile phone network operators are beginning the process of protecting themselves against mobile phone viruses, but are unlikely to take the problem seriously until a serious incident occurs.
Greg Day, security consultant at McAfee, told vnunet.com at the Infosec show that security companies are laying down the groundwork for security systems that would prevent their networks becoming blocked in the event of a major virus attack.
The crusade to win a greater share of the operating system market away from Microsoft's Windows has long fired up the hearts of the Mac and Linux faithful. But popularity breeds contempt - from hackers. A new study of "malware" - viruses, worms, and other software nasties - released Friday by Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab shows a doubling in the number of viruses and worms targeting Linux from 2004 to 2005. The trend is worth watching, says Linux Pipeline, but must be put in context.
Security breaches from computer viruses, hacker attacks and staff misuse of the internet are costing British business £10bn a year, according to a DTI backed report published yesterday.
The biannual survey of 1,000 companies by PricewaterhouseCooper shows losses are 50% higher on the 2004 figure - this despite increased spending on security systems. Larger firms saw the number of security breaches fall, but the average cost of each incident rose to £65,000-£130,000 in disruption.
Linus Torvalds has had an opportunity to examine the testing and analysis by Hans-Werner Hilse which we reported on yesterday, and has blessed it as being correct. The reason that the virus is not propagating itself in the latest kernel versions is due to a bug in how GCC handles specific registers in a particular system call. He has coded a patch for the kernel to allow the virus to work on even the latest Linux kernel. That may sound terribly complex, so let's break it down.
Computers infected with a well-known worm began downloading a new spam tool Sunday night used by hackers to send unwanted e-mail. Virus writers from the infamous Bagle spam gang began sending a new spamming tool Sunday night to thousands of hacked computers, said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for F-Secure, a security company based in Helsinki.
If a computer is infected with the Bagle virus, a hacker can download other malicious programs to the machine. In turn, those programs can send out spam to other machines without the knowledge of the user.
More than 20 000 computers were infected in one day by a sophisticated new computer virus unleashed by a Vietnamese programmer, the first of its kind in the country, an Internet security official said on Tuesday.
The "Gai Xinh" (Pretty Girl) virus uses Yahoo Messenger to infect computers when users click on a link ostensibly from an instant-messenger contact. Clicking on the link sends an instant message with the same link to all Yahoo contacts, but it was limited to certain Vietnamese-language websites.
Hackers have released a sample code for a virus that could infect both Linux and Windows PCs. The virus, which was given the double name Virus.Linux.Bi.a/ Virus.Win32.Bi.a, was reported Friday by security firm Kaspersky Lab. Security researchers worry that the malicious code may be part of a disturbing new trend of viruses that can run on Windows, as well as other operating systems that have been largely ignored by hackers.
Hewlett-Packard acknowledged this week that software used to control two of its color printers could be exploited by attackers to remotely steal files from Windows PCs.
The bug, which Danish vulnerability tracker Secunia dubbed "less critical," affects the Toolbox software included with the Color LaserJet 2500 and Color LaserJet 4600. In its default configuration, the Toolbox -- which lets users remotely monitor the status of a connected printer -- could allow an attacker to hack into jacked-in computers, then read any file on the hard disk.
Just days after the passing of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic inventive hackers have already unleashed a virus bearing his name.
