Viruses & Malware

Nguyen Viet The, Head of the Professional Informatics Technology Department under the Ministry of Public Security, has said on Buu Dien, that competent agencies have found the malware specializing in stealing confidential information which can be infected through a USB or the malware, can penetrate through back door into computers, then automatically steal all sensitive documents stored in the computers to be saved at external addresses.

I stopped following the spam problem in detail a while ago, but assumed that China was a major source of the stuff. It just sort of seems like it would be, but it turns out this is no longer the case.

In most countries it's cheap and easy to register a domain name. Not in China where the government makes you run things past them. A side-effect was to kill off spamming from Chinese domains. It all began with a directive from CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center), which administers the .CN domain:

Internet Explorer 9's dual-pronged approach to blocking access to malicious URLs—SmartScreen Filter to block bad URLs, and Application Reputation to detect untrustworthy executables—provides the best socially engineered malware blocking of any stable browser version, according to NSS Labs' latest report.

Over the past few weeks we have been tracking another widespread compromise of legitimate web sites. Huge numbers of sites have been injected with a malicious JavaScript that attempts to load content from an exploit site when innocent users browse the affected pages.

Readers of Melbourne’s Herald Sun website may have been exposed to a virus, the News Limited tabloid’s website said this week, in another embarrassment for the media company.

‘The Herald Sun wishes to apologise to any readers who may have been affected by a virus that appeared for a short time on heraldsun.com.au,’’ the newspaper said in a note posted to its website. ‘‘The offending virus and files were quickly removed and the site is operating as normal."

Most malware doesn't intentionally set out to damage your PC, that's bad for business - the authors want their creations to stay hidden, so your system remains infected for as long as possible. But whether it's through programming bugs, partial clashes with antivirus software or other reasons, a serious infection can sometimes trash your PC to the point where Windows will no longer boot. And what do you do then?

Researchers have discovered a new variant of the insidious Zeus trojan that is designed to run on Google Android smartphones, security researchers have warned.

The malicious program is a new version of Zitmo, a mobile trojan application first discovered last year that stands for “Zeus in the mobile,” Derek Manky, a senior security strategist at network security firm Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs, told SCMagazineUS.com on Tuesday.

By now, security-conscious IT pros know about the new and improved version of the iOS jailbreaking software, jailbreakme, now with iPad 2 support. It ingeniously exploits a flaw in the iOS PDF display code to, via a buffer overrun attack, load jailbreak code into the root file system of the device. Once rebooted, the hacked code injects itself into the device's startup sequence using the video frame buffer as its temporary scratch memory.

Security researchers have come across a new Android Trojan that sends Short Message Service communications to prime-rate numbers. This comes shortly after reports emerged that the Zeus gang has come up with an Android version of their banking malware.

Microsoft has disabled the search results on its Security Centre after malware-spreaders abused the function to promote shady pornographic websites serving Trojans as well as cheap thrills.

Only the Security Section of Microsoft's website was affected by the search-engine poisoning attack. Such attacks are often used to place scareware portals and the like high in the index of searches for terms in the news, such as royal weddings, celebrity deaths and natural disasters.