Dutch police have arrested three people for building a worldwide zombie network of more than 100,000 PCs used to launch internet attacks on companies and to hack into bank and Paypal accounts.
The main suspect, a 19 year-old man, and his alleged accomplices, a 22 year-old and a 27 year-old, were collared in raids on their homes. Police seized "several computers, documents, a bank account, bare cash and a sports car". More arrests are expected.
The dream of a connected world where PCs and mobile phones can communicate with the digital home and other devices is supposed to make life easier. But it could instead make life far more dangerous if malware developers have their way.
And it's not just the possibility of losing a credit card number. With microchips and software becoming more and more a part of life, such as in cars, homes and mobile phones, the threats multiply dramatically.
The dream of a connected world where PCs and mobile phones can communicate with the digital home and other devices is supposed to make life easier. But it could instead make life far more dangerous if malware developers have their way.
And it's not just the possibility of losing a credit card number. With microchips and software becoming more and more a part of life, such as in cars, homes and mobile phones, the threats multiply dramatically.
Yet another virus targeting mobile devices has emerged, this time with a new twist: It has the potential to infect PCs when users transfer data from phone to computer.
The Cardtrap.A Trojan resembles other malware targeting handhelds running the Symbian operating system, such as Cabir, that typically spread through a phone's built-in messaging applications or by way of Bluetooth wireless connections.
However, unlike earlier mobile-phone viruses, Cardtrap.A has a built-in mechanism that plants two worms on a phone's memory card with the ultimate goal of infecting a PC.
Infected binary or source code files aren't anything new. And sometimes they are found on public servers. Mozilla.org is the latest example.
Korean distributives for mozilla and thunderbird for linux turned out to be infected - mozilla-installer-bin from mozilla-1.7.6.ko-KR.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz and mozilla-xremote-client from thunderbird-1.0.2.tar.gz were infected with Virus.Linux.RST.b
Hackers have spammed out multiple new variants of the Bagle Trojan to millions of email addresses this week.
The attacks came in two waves on Monday and Tuesday and forced many anti-virus firms to issue multiple signature updates over a greatly compressed period.
The infected messages typically have a blank subject line, body text saying 'new price', and malicious file attachments such as '09_price.zip', 'price_new.zip', and 'price2.zip'. The attached ZIP files commonly contain a malicious file called price.exe, containing various variants of the Bagle Trojan.
London is the zombie capital of the world, with approximately 150,000 PCs secretly controlled by hackers, Symantec has revealed.
A new worm modifies the infected PC so attempts to search using Google are directed to a spoofed site that looks like the real thing, but with different sponsored links to drive traffic to sites the hacker's designated, a security firm said Friday.
Panda Software's analysis of the P2Load.a worm showed that after compromising a PC, it modifies the Windows HOSTS file so all attempts to reach google.com -- and even mistyped addresses, such as "googel.com" -- are redirected to a site actually served from Germany.
According to a July report from the Pew Internet & Americal Life Project, more than 90% of Internet users have changed their online behavior to avoid spyware. That is a remarkably high level of awareness, considering the relative newness of the spyware threat.
COMPUTER hackers are crippling mobile phones with new viruses which can leave consumers with bills of hundreds of pounds.
Mobile industry experts warn that the next generation of phones face an increasing threat from hackers as they get to grips with new technology. More than 70 mobile phone viruses have been discovered this year alone. One virus, known as Commwarrior, spreads itself via Bluetooth connections, sending text and picture messages to all the numbers in the phone's address book during the night. Users only discover the problem after receiving huge phone bills.
