Viruses & Malware

Here's a new excuse for not getting to work on time on a Monday morning: My car caught a virus.

Car industry officials and analysts say hackers' growing interest in writing viruses for wireless devices puts auto computer systems at risk of infection.

As carmakers adjust on-board computers to allow consumers to transfer information with MP3 players and mobile phones, they also make their vehicles vulnerable to mobile viruses that jump between devices via the Bluetooth technology that connects them.

Outbound spyware transmissions from infested machines accounted for up to eight per cent of total outbound web traffic in pilot tests of a new managed spyware screening service. UK web security firm ScanSafe said the volume of traffic observed during a 10 week pilot test of its Spyware Screening service showed that spyware applications are becoming more and more stealthy in their ability to hide their outbound 'covert' channels among normal web traffic. That's bad news because data sent when spyware "calls-home" can include confidential and even privileged information.

Ground zero in the war on viruses, worms and other cyberbugs is a dim, windowless office on the first floor of an anonymous gray stone office building in a business district of this Washington suburb.

Here in Symantec's security operations center, software engineers and virus hunters search for new variations of old worms or freshly minted viruses that have been crafted to exploit some vulnerability built into commonly used computer software.

Paying bounties to track down and prosecute writers of computer worms no longer works, according to security experts at Symantec (Nasdaq: SYMC) Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) has stated, however, that it expects to continue the reward program that helped to convict Sven Jaschan, the author of the Sasser and Netsky worms. Symantec believes that the shift is a result of the changing hacking landscape. Worms and viruses are increasingly used for identity theft or to create zombie PCs used to launch distributed denial of service attacks or send spam.

What first appeared a simple equipment malfunction may be another virus attacking Lake County government computers.

While technicians were still conducting tests Tuesday afternoon, Lake County Data Processing Director Mark Pearman said they were “fairly certain” the county has been hit by its second computer virus in three weeks.

The initial diagnosis — that a piece of hardware in the county data processing center had gone haywire — apparently was a red herring, Pearman said.

Experts at SophosLabs™, Sophos's global network of virus and spam analysis centers, have advised users not to panic about a new worm which displays a message claiming to come from an extraterrestial alien.

The WM97/Sundor-A worm displays a picture of an alien with the following message:

I'm the alien.
Have a happy week.
I liked your computer.

It looks like, lately, there's not week that goes by without a new type of worm or virus to appear. And this week's no different, because there are two new viruses out there that are giving the security companies a rough time.

Trend Micro has detected a new IM-based worm, WORM_OPANKI.Y, which uses the file name ITUNES.EXE for its routines. The worm spreads via AOL Instant Messenger, one of the top three IM applications in the world, and exploits the popularity of the iTunes application for music downloads.

OPANKI.Y sends the message “this picture never gets old” to all online contacts of the affected user. The message it sends contains a link to a downloadable file which contains a JPG extension to appear credible. However, the downloaded file is instead saved as ITUNES.EXE in the user's system.

One of the bigger complaints about Google's search ability is the amount of sites containing various amounts of malware or spyware or viruses still tend to permeate Google's search results. Many a horror story has been told about a users getting some type of computer infection from a site they've discovered on Google (or any search engine for that matter).

A double-edged threat that attempts to hijack Windows PCs has surfaced in at least three variants, security companies warned on Friday.

The new pest, Lebreat, is a combined network worm and mass-mailing worm, F-Secure said. Once run on a PC, it installs a backdoor for hackers, downloads the mass-mailer code and attempts to launch a DoS attack that targets security giant Symantec's Web site, the Finnish antivirus specialist said. The malicious code is also known as Breatle and Reatle at other antivirus companies.