Viruses & Malware

Just three days after Microsoft disclosed multiple critical vulnerabilities in Windows, exploit code for one of the most dangerous has appeared on the Internet. Security firms sent out alerts warning Windows 2000 users to patch ASAP or risk a worm attack in the near future.

"I don't think [Windows 2000] users have an awful lot of time to patch," said Gunter Ollmann, the director of Internet Security Systems' (ISS) X-force research group. "We'll most certainly see a worm using this exploit," he added.

Visitors to the world athletics championships in Finland have had to brave wind and rain, and officials say they now face the possibility of catching the world's first mobile phone virus.

Officials in mobile-mad Finland, home to the world's largest cellphone maker Nokia, said there had been outbreaks of the Cabir virus at Helsinki's Olympic Stadium.

"At most we are speaking about dozens of infections, but during a short period and in one spot this is a huge number," said Jarmo Koski, a security official at telecoms firm TeliaSonera.

The mobile phones of millions of Algerian subscribers may be damaged by an aggressive virus called "A.C.U", reported the August 9 edition of Al-Khabar daily reported. The virus originated in computers and in the internet, and might enter the mobile phone network through connection to the internet or to computers, the newspaper warned. mobile phoneThe virus spreads very quickly and causes a total damage to several components of the mobile phone itself, including the battery cabin, and to the saved data.

AV vendors are warning users that the latest W32/Mytob-DA variant is on the prowl, this time masquerading as an e-mail message from their own security administrator that will allow their machines to be remotely controlled.

Sometime last year, the cat and mouse switched places on the Internet.

The hackers used to be the little guys, scampering around unleashing viruses and furtive attacks against Web sites. It was a nuisance, but big government and commercial sites generally could chase them away.

Future worms may be able to slip through the early warning networks deployed by the likes of SANS Internet Storm Center and Symantec, researchers from the University of Wisconsin said last week.

A new Trojan is spreading in an email purporting to be an alert about a major loss of life in Iraq.

The emails were first detected last night and claim to contain a report from The Guardian on the death of 140 US Marines. The email contains a link to the 'full story' but leads users to a bogus web page with two Trojans built in.

The Cgab-A and Borodr-Fam Trojans can be downloaded through an improperly patched version of Internet Explorer.

Costin Raiu, the head of research and development for Kaspersky Labs Romania, said on Tuesday that over the weekend a virus writer tried to spread a Trojan by exploiting a known image-handling flaw. This flaw was patched by Microsoft last year, but it is likely that some users are still vulnerable, particularly as the flaw affected a number of Microsoft's products.

Anti-virus firm Sophos has revealed the top ten viruses causing problems for businesses around the world during the month of July 2005. The report, compiled from Sophos' global network of monitoring stations reveals that Netsky-P, the worm written by the recently convicted German teenager, Sven Jaschan, tops the charts this month. However, it is the variants of the Mytob worm that are dominating the polls - accounting for seven of the top ten positions and over 37% of all viruses reported to Sophos in July.

The top ten viruses in July were as follows:

A worm that targets gamers is making the rounds, tapping into popular titles and peer-to-peer file sharing, a security company has warned.

The worm, Hagbard.A, tries to disguise itself on peer-to-peer networks as pirated downloads of the popular games titles "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," "Need for Speed Underground 2" and 400 other programs, Sophos said in an advisory released on Friday.