With a publicly available search engine, a few well-chosen e-mail addresses, and off-the-shelf viral code, anyone can commit an act of cyberterrorism--or so says Roelof Temmingh, technical director of SensePost, a South African computer security company.
Anti-virus companies have identified a new computer virus that could be characterised as a remote-controlled time bomb.
Computer experts have warned of a computer worm that takes advantage of a flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.
The latest problem is called "worm/MiMail.A," also known as W32.Mimail.A@mm.
It's a mass-mailing Internet worm that started spreading late Friday afternoon, and according to Central Command, a computer security company, caught many computer systems administrators by surprise.
A dangerous strain of 'virus spam' is tricking computer users into allowing serious infections into home and business computer systems, IT experts have warned.
According to industry body The Corporate IT Forum (Tif) virus spam, or 'v-spam', dodges antivirus and firewall systems by tempting users to click on a website link contained in an email which then sends them a virus.
Tif said that incidents of v-spam are increasing at the same rate as spam, which has doubled over the past year.
Netxactics, the southern African distributor for Sophos Anti-Virus, reports that the new Gruel worm (W32/Gruel-D) – the latest in a number of variants of the worm, which poses as a critical security patch from Microsoft – attacks Windows installation and gets abusive in the process.
Source: IT Web
Trojans, which are increasingly being used to steal credit card data and passwords, or to launch attacks against organisations, are not picked up adequately by basic security software such as an anti-virus engine, states a white paper issued by global security and messaging company GFI.
The paper describes the seven main types of Trojan and explains how a Trojan can infect a network via an e-mail attachment or downloaded file.
Source: Internet Magazine
A new mass-mailing worm promises naughty photos of Shakira and pictures of Julia Roberts on the toilet to persuade people to open an email attachment.
The MyLife.M worm will then send itself to all the contacts found in the infected machine's Outlook address book.
"Worse still, if the time is between 50 and 59 minutes past the hour, the worm attempts to delete files from the hard drive," a statement from anti-virus firm Sophos said.
A recent post on Bugtraq has revealed a serious flaw in the core design of the freely-available personal firewall ZoneAlarm running on MS Windows. Thanks to the Win32 ShellExecute function in Windows, ZoneAlarm could theoretically be tweaked into opening an unsecured Internet connection and leaking information into web servers anywhere.
Source: The Register
A recent post on Bugtraq (27/06/03) introduced the world to a new worm currently slithering its way through IRC.
Mindjail is a new variant of Backdoor.SdBot code that once activated installs a backdoor into infected systems. IRC channels are scanned by bots seeking users, who are then spammed...
Sobig-E isn't the first worm to try to ZIP its way around the Internet. Some worm writers have tried to embed malicious code in a ZIP file before, but this is the first time a piece of malicious code has had the capability to send itself out as a ZIP file, experts said.
