The Japanese Ministry of Defense has revealed its latest project to tackle hacking: a ’seek and destroy’ virus designed to track and disable the source of cyber-attacks.
The project, launched in 2008, cost $2.3 million over three years. Several companies competed for the contract, but Fujitsu was eventually commissioned to develop the new ‘cyberweapon’.
Two thirds of a random assortment of USB flash drives bought second-hand at an Australian rail company lost property auction turned out to be infected with malware, security company Sophos has reported.
Despite being light-hearted and not particularly scientific, the survey offers an alarming insight into the insecure working life of the average USB drive, at least as far as suburban Australia is concerned.
Some Android anti-virus firms have begun releasing Carrier IQ detection apps, but only after the controversial software became a talking point on Capitol Hill ... and a month after a security researcher first discovered it.
Facebook users are being warned against new malware that has affected the social networking platform by spreading through the chat system.
According to UK based security software maker Sophos, the platform has been affected with malware that installs Dorkbot worms on target systems.
Gordon Lyon is a popular, successful and charismatic open-source software maker. Right now, he's not a happy man.
You probably know him better by his nickname, Fyodor (after Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of Notes From Undergound). He is the creator and maintainer of the widely-used network auditing and penetration-testing tool Nmap.
F-Secure has released its latest version Mobile Security 7.5, a security offering for mobile devices to provide improved security and parental control capabilities on Android devices to meet the mobile security concerns with young people using smartphones.
F-Secure's anti-virus technologies will be complemented with new cloud-based services that provide immediate information on whether a mobile application is considered safe to install which provides comprehensive protection against spying programs and the full range of other mobile threats.
Security vendors are behaving like "charlatans and scammers" by peddling antivirus apps to protect consumers from smartphone malware, Google's open source champion Chris DiBona says in an uncompromising attack on the industry.
In recent weeks, antivirus vendors including Kaspersky Lab, McAfee and even infrastructure companies Juniper Networks and IBM, have highlighted the claimed menace posed by malware on Android in particular, which might explain the Google engineer's feistiness.
Antivirus experts disagree with Chris DiBona, Google's open-source programs manager, who recently said that there is no virus problem on the Android platform and that companies selling anti-malware software for mobile operating systems are "charlatans."
"Yes, virus companies are playing on your fears to try to sell you bs protection software for Android, RIM and IOS," DiBona said in a post on Google+. "They are charlatans and scammers. If you work for a company selling virus protection for Android, RIM or IOS you should be ashamed of yourself," he added.
One of the latest trojan horse malware attempts on OS X is a bitcoin mining and data stealing bot called "DevilRobber" that uses the system's parallel processing capabilities of systems (the GPU and CPU) to run Bitcoin mining operations to rapidly generate Bitcoins (an experimental digital currency).
Most Internet users know about the existence of software Trojans, but that of hardware ones is less known. They consist of integrated circuits that have been modified by malicious individuals so that when triggered, they try to disable or bypass the system's security, or even destroy the entire chip on which they are located.
