Viruses & Malware

Late last week, I wrote about some eye-raising statements made by a British Telecom (BT) security expert at the NetEvents Americas. Now, BT has backpedaled on the claims. To refresh your memory, here's what Jill Knesek, head of the global security practice at BT, said:

We analyzed more than 1,000 Android applications and found a third compromised with some form of active or dormant malware. Almost every device is compromised with some kind of malware, although often it's not clear if that code is active or what it is doing.

Malicious software, like all software, gets smarter all the time. In recent years it’s learned to destroy physical infrastructure, install itself through Microsoft updates, and use human beings as physical “data mules,” for instance. But researcher Jonathan Brossard has innovated a uniquely nasty coding trick: A strain of malware that’s nearly impossible to disinfect.

Two researchers demonstrated how they were able to push a malicious information-stealing app onto Google Play, even while Google's Bouncer custom malware scanner is watching.

They circumvented Bouncer, an automated scanner, with a JavaScript trick that transformed a benign Android app into a malicious one on Google Play, Nicholas Percoco, head of Trustwave Spider Labs, told attendees at Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

A new script-based malware threat for OS X has been uncovered by security company Intego. The malware, called OSX/Crisis, has so far not been found "in the wild," but it has the potential to do harm.

Security researchers said Tuesday they have come across a new strain of espionage malware that has successfully infected 800 different organizations this year in the Middle East to steal information and spy on communications.

Security researchers have discovered malware disguised as games hosted on the Google Play marketplace.

Android.Dropdialer, a Trojan that sends costly text messages to premium-rate phone numbers in Eastern Europe, had gone undiscovered for weeks in the form of two game titles, Symantec researcher Irfan Asrar wrote in a blog post yesterday. The two games -- "Super Mario Bros." and "GTA 3 - Moscow city" -- were uploaded to Google Play on June 24 and generated 50,000 to 100,000 downloads, Asrar said.

Think you might have a computer infection? Facebook's here to help.

Following up on April's rollout of the Facebook Anti-Virus Marketplace, which offered free anti-virus software, Facebook has debuted "Malware Checkpoint for Facebook," which will scan anyone's PC for any viruses, worms, Trojans or other malicious software.

Security company Trusteer is warning about an Android Trojan that is being distributed by criminals to beat the SMS smartphone authentication systems employed by European banks to verify money transfers.

Man-in-the middle (MitM) attacks on 2FA technology via mobiles started around a year ago based on the simple observation that the apparent strength of SMS verification is also its weakness if hackers are able to compromise the handset itself.

A security firm says it has spotted malware from China dubbed the Warp Trojan that takes a totally new approach: After infecting a vulnerable Windows computer, it pretends to be a router and tells the real local subnet router to send traffic for other networked computers to the infected machine, so the malware can then try to compromise the other computers through a man-in-the-middle attack.

Monday, 9 July, was supposed to be 'Internet Doomsday' when the US' Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was to shut down servers associated with the DNSChanger malware. As a result, computers infected with this threat were to be cut off from the Internet.