Viruses & Malware

It has been 26 years to the day when the computing world was introduced to its first virus: The Brain.

The Brain was a boot sector virus that was written on and for floppy disks and spread by the exchange of disks between users. The Brain which was also known as LeHore or Pakistani Flu and Pakistani Brain, infected Microsoft MS-DOS-based computers and once installed would fill up the floppy, slamming its performance or rendering it useless.

Over the past year we have regularly covered new malware threats that have emerged for OS X, which included attacks like MacDefender, BlackHole RAT, Flashback, and Revir, among a number of others.

While our coverage of these threats may make them appear significant, when looking at the overall Mac malware scene in review it's apparent that despite the increase in Mac malware prevalence, the threats for the Mac platform are still quite minimal. Additionally, data suggests Mac malware trends may not follow market share as many suspect it does.

A new strain of cybercrime Trojan is targeting Facebook users by taking over their machines and shaking them down for cash.

Carberp, like its predecessors ZeuS and SpyEye, infects machines by tricking punters into opening PDFs and Excel documents loaded with malicious code, or attacks computers in drive-by downloads. The hidden malware is designed to steal account information, and harvest credentials for email and social-networking sites.

As expected, Facebook today started to release information about the Koobface worm (its name is an anagram of “Facebook”) and those behind it. The update comes almost a year since Facebook’s last post about the infamous piece of malware. After more than three years and numerous hours of working closely with industry leaders, the security community, and law enforcement, Facebook has announced its social network has been free of the virus for over nine months.

A new strain of the Sykipot malware is being used by Chinese cyber criminals to compromise US Department of Defense (DoD) smart cards, a new report has revealed.

The malware has been designed to take advantage of smart card readers running ActivClient - the client application of ActivIdentity - according to unified security information and event management (SIEM) company AlienVault.

Personal banking information and other data from perhaps tens of thousands of students, faculty and administrators at City College of San Francisco have been stolen in what is being called "an infestation" of computer viruses with origins in criminal networks in Russia, China and other countries, The Chronicle has learned.

At work for more than a decade, the viruses were detected a few days after Thanksgiving, when the college's data security monitoring service detected an unusual pattern of computer traffic, flagging trouble.

BKAV said that 39,000 new viruses appeared in 2011, while W32.Sality.PE is believed to be the most widespread with 4.2 million computers getting infected with this kind of virus. Especially, BKAV has warned that it is not only the biggest culprit in 2011, but may also affect millions of computers in the time to come.

A variant of the notorious Zeus virus has been circulating the offices of government agencies through an email from hackers who are aping the sender address @US-CERT.GOV, the true U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team disclosed Wednesday evening. Researchers outside of US-CERT traced the malicious software to a botnet -- a remotely-controlled network of infected computers -- that is taking commands from computers located in Russia.

Remember the pre-Christmas Carrier IQ controversy where hidden tracking software was found to be installed on Android handsets? Well now security researchers have found smartphone malware posing as removal tool for Carrier IQ spyware.

According to Symantec , the French hackers behind  Android.Qicsomos have modified their malware from an open source project designed to detect Carrier IQ software so that handsets are now programmed to dial a premium rate SMS number.

Trojans—they're not just for hackers anymore. German police, for instance, love them; a scandal erupted in Parliament last year after federal investigators were found to be using custom spyware that could potentially record far more information than allowed by law. The story made headlines, but it lacked a certain sense of the bizarre.