Viruses & Malware

According to the Moscow-headquartered IT security vendor, the striking parallels between the two malicious programs suggest they were either both written by the same group of people or that the Stuxnet source code – which has not been made publicly available – was used in its creation.

The bad news, however, is that there are significant differences between the two programs and, says Kaspersky, Duqu contains no functionality targeting industrial systems, as was the case with Stuxnet.

Facebook has been hit with a surge of violent and pornographic images spreading across the network in the last 24 hours.

The photoshopped images show celebrities like Justin Beiber appearing to a perform hardcore sex act, while there's unsavoury pictures pics of dogs being abused. The photos have apparently spread through a click-jacking virus, which encourages users to click on seemingly innocuous links and then goes on a widespread re-posting spree throughout their friend list.

An attack on several Brazilian ISPs has exposed large numbers of their subscribers to malware attacks when they attempt to visit Hotmail, Gmail, and other trusted websites, security researchers have warned.

Indian authorities are investigating a computer server in Mumbai for links to the Duqu malicious software that some security experts warned could be the next big cyber threat.

Web Werks, a Mumbai-based Web-hosting company, said it had given an image of the suspicious virtual private server to officials from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), after security firm Symantec Corp found the server was communicating with computers infected with the Duqu virus.

With such a widespread increase in malicious, fraudulent, phishing and scamming sites appearing daily, what guarantees does the IT administrator have that one of the employees will not visit a website that has been compromised and infected by malware?

Very few! And those guarantees disappear if the organization does not have adequate security solutions in place. We’re not talking just email security here but web security as well.

In the continuing saga of the malware known as Duqu, CrySyS Lab at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics has announced it was able to acquire a copy of the "dropper" from one of the victims.

What is a dropper and what does this mean? A dropper is a term used by anti-virus researchers to denote a piece of code that is usually installed onto a computer to download further malicious components.

Hackers are testing new Mac malware that they've ported from a nine-year-old Trojan horse originally written for Linux, according to security experts.

The malware, dubbed "Tsunami," has been circulating in limited numbers since last week, said researchers at the Slovakian antivirus firm, ESET Security.

A new Trojan horse hidden in a Mac OS X application can steal sensitive user data and take control of the computer’s GPU to generate Bitcoins, a form of currency used online.

In a report released on Saturday, security firm Sophos said that DevilRobber, a Trojan horse that can steal sensitive user data, was found hidden inside copies of Graphic Converter 7.4 downloaded from bit-torrent file-sharing sites.

The scourge of rogue anti-virus (AV) software considerably has eased since June, according to Kaspersky Lab.

Researcher Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky said there currently are about 10,000 daily attempts to compromise machines with fake AV programs, down from roughly 55,000 in June.

OSX/Tsunami-A, a new backdoor Trojan horse for Mac OS X, has been discovered.

What makes Tsunami particularly interesting is that it appears to be a port of Troj/Kaiten, a Linux backdoor Trojan horse that once it has embedded itself on a computer system listens to an IRC channel for further instructions.