Some 55 per cent of Chinese computers are infected with malware, the highest of any country worldwide, according to the latest Annual Security Report from Panda Security.
The Spanish security vendor’s Panda Labs research team reported 27 million new strains of malware in 2012, bringing the total in its database to 125m.
Security vendor Malwarebytes has uncovered a banking Trojan capable of bypassing traditional security by spoofing legitimate digital certificates.
The certificate used by the malware is usually legitimate but it's now being sent out by a fake-company set up to get hold of the certificates from Digicert.
Federal authorities announced Wednesday they had disrupted a massive cybercrime ring, charging three alleged hackers with using "one of the most financially destructive computer viruses in history" to steal millions of dollars from banks around the world.
Electronics accessory maker Hama has admitted that a 35mm photographic film scanner sold to German consumers over Christmas came with a software disk infected with the irrepressible Conficker worm.
Reported earlier this month but only noticed by eagle-eyed reporters now, the report on Heise Security said that the slide scanner, sold through the Tchibo chain for about £50 (US$79) a shot, loaded the malware when the main executable was run.
Trend Micro has spotted a piece of malicious software that masquerades as the latest patch for Java, a typically opportunistic move by hackers.
Oracle released two emergency patches on Sunday for its Java programming language and application platform, which is installed on millions of computers worldwide.
In what is being called a new hunt for Red October, a Russian cyber-security company says it has discovered a major international malware system that has attacked and compromised the computers of government agencies, diplomatic consulates, research centers and defense installations, among other sensitive institutions.
If malware somehow manages to penetrate your PCs defenses then it’s easy to assume you’ll simply download some other antivirus tool to remove it. But life may not be so straightforward. Once installed, some malware will try to prevent you from reaching big antivirus sites, and downloading or running their tools, making the problem much more difficult to tackle.
Unless, that is, you have a copy of Malwarebytes Chameleon to hand.
In my last column, I talked about making online shopping safer, starting with ensuring your computer isn't already infected with some devious malware. But I didn't tell readers how to confirm that their computer wasn't maliciously compromised from the start.
In a recent twist that mirrors the the plot of the movie Men In Black, Japanese police have recovered a memory card on the collar of a stray cat that contains clues left by a particularly notorious hacker who claims to have created the "remote control virus."
A study released in December by US security outfit Imperva has tipped a bucket on the multi-billion-dollar anti-virus industry, claiming that initial detection rates are as low as five percent, and concluding that enterprise and consumer anti-virus spend “is not proportional to its effectiveness”.
Working in conjunction with students from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the company tested 82 malware samples against 40 anti-virus products including offerings from Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee and Kaspersky.
