A trojan is spying on surfers and displaying messages from the Koran if they look at naughty websites.
The Yusufali.A virus monitors the title bar of an active window and looks for words such as "XXX", "Sex" and "teen", if it finds anything offensive it minimizes the window and displays a religious message.
A newly developed Bluetooth advertising scheme could make mobile phone viruses more commonplace by teaching users bad habits, I.T. security experts said today.
The technique, known as Bluestreaming, has been pioneered by British firm Filter UK. It involves beaming pictures and music direct to people's mobile phones.
The company had run a pilot with six sites in London railway stations and in a two-week period detected 87,000 phones capable of receiving the material, of which 17 percent accepted the download.
The plug-and-play vulnerability that caused havoc for Windows 2000 users last week also holds a serious risk for some Windows XP users, Microsoft said Tuesday.
Computers running Windows XP with Service Pack 1 in a specific configuration are vulnerable to worm attacks similar to the ones that hit Windows 2000 systems, Microsoft said in a security advisory published Tuesday.
The ugly new computer worms that wriggled their way onto the Internet last week didn't cause widespread damage or disruption — and that's what worries many security experts the most.
Unlike earlier generations of worms, Zotob, Rbot and their cousins were designed not to damage computers or networks, but to steal information and then secretly take over their host computers and turn them to other uses.
The experts say they are signs of an ongoing evolution in the hacker world from mere maliciousness to clear-cut crime.
olden has lost A$6 million ($6.58 million) in car production because of a computer virus which also caused major problems in the United States and Canada.
Holden was forced to shut down its vehicle assembly plant in Adelaide for several hours after its computer network was infiltrated by what was thought to be the Zotob virus.
About the same time, the virus hit at least two Canadian banks and several major businesses in the US, including DaimlerChrysler, ABC News, CNN, the New York Times and General Electric.
Variants of the Zotob worm caused damage to American Express' internal networks yesterday, but the company said its transactional systems were unaffected.
The Zotob worm, which was discovered last weekend, has been causing havoc in the United States over the past few days. Antivirus firms and Microsoft Australia have been playing down the impact of Zotob in Australia, but ZDNet Australia has discovered that it did wreak havoc.
Computer worms that have brought down systems around the world in recent days are starting to attack each other, Finnish software security firm F-Secure said on Wednesday.
"We seem to have a botwar on our hands," said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure.
"There appear to be three different virus-writing gangs turning out new worms at an alarming rate, as if they were competing to build the biggest network of infected machines."
PC users have been put on their guard as variations of the Zotob worm are exploiting weak spots in the latest Windows operating system overseas. The Korea Information Security Agency (KISA) said Tuesday the Zobot worms attack a loophole in Windows’ Plug and Play (PnP) program and could hit Korea after a number of different versions were detected abroad.
Next year's FIFA World Cup soccer tournament in Germany could be fertile ground for mobile phone viruses if the World Athletics Championships in Finland, which ended Sunday, are any indication, security experts warn.
Visitors to the athletic event in Helsinki not only had to brave wind and rain, but also face the threat of catching the Cabir mobile phone worm.
Outbreaks of the malware, which first surfaced in June last year, were reported in Helsinki's Olympic Stadium, according to Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for antivirus research at F-Secure Corp.
Experts at SophosLabs™, Sophos's global network of virus, spyware and spam analysis centers, have warned computer users of a new worm that exploits a recently discovered security vulnerability in Microsoft's software.
The W32/Zotob-A worm spreads to other network computers by exploiting security holes in Microsoft's software. Details of these security holes can be found in Microsoft security bulletins MS04-011 and MS05-039.
Once the Zotob worm has infected a PC it opens a backdoor, allowing remote hackers to gain access and control over the computer.
