Viruses & Malware

A new mobile phone virus has been discovered to have infected 150,000 people in China allowing hackers to remotely monitor calls, according to the Beijing Times on Wednesday.

The virus, named X Undercover, takes advantage of existing vulnerabilities in smart phones by forcing the three-way calling service to secretly open. Conversations and text messages can be monitored and copied after the virus breaks into the calling sequence, said Zou Shihong, a security expert with NetQin Mobile Inc.

What's "pervasive memory scraping" and why is it considered by SANS Institute security researchers to be among the most dangerous attack techniques likely to be used in coming the coming year?

A financial Trojan able to hijack online banking sessions has been spotted.

Trusteer named the new piece of malware OddJob, noting how it could keep banking sessions going even after customers believed they had logged off. OddJob was used to log requests, grab full pages, terminate connections and inject data into web pages, with all activity relayed to a command and control server.

A rash of Google Android malware has appeared in recent weeks, causing one security researcher to dissect how one nasty piece of code, Android.Adrd - a search engine manipulation trojan - functions, and compare it to another piece of malware, Android.Geinimi.

According to Takashi Katsuki, a security researcher with Symantec Asia-Pacific, Android.Adrd is unique in being the first Android operating system trojan whose purpose is search engine manipulation.

Phishing attacks on small and medium-sized businesses are on the rise with thousands of organizations falling victim. If a cybercriminal gets on to a computer with access to your business' financial accounts they can withdraw funds and your business is out of the money. That's it. Gone. See ya. Have a nice day.

Having spoken on the ‘Public, meet private: Lessons learned in chasing cyber crooks’ panel at the RSA 2011 conference in San Francisco, Pedro Bustamante, senior research analyst at Panda Security, tells Infosecurity’s Eleanor Dallaway why geography is obstructing cyber legal justice

While Bustamante concedes that law enforcement around information security has improved somewhat, he argues that it is still a slow, long fight when it comes to arresting the offenders. The main reason for this, he insists, is the “international problem”.

The Stuxnet software worm repeatedly sought to infect five industrial facilities in Iran over a 10-month period, a new report says, in what could be a clue into how it might have infected the Iranian uranium enrichment complex at Natanz.

Attacks on the Mac are now significant enough to warrant Apple users investing in an anti-virus product, security company Panda Security said as it launched a new product that offers such protection.

Marketing spin to harvest the Apple economy or justified caution? Panda points to the numbers. There are now 5,000 ‘strains’ of malware that target the Mac and the company says it is seeing 500 new Mac-specific samples appearing every month.

Australia’s ABC News is reporting that the dispatch system of the NSW Ambulance Service has been infected with a computer virus.

As a result, according to the radio news report at midday on Sunday 13 February, emergency calls are being serviced by a manual system while staff work to clear the virus and return the ten-year-old dispatch system to service.

Computers, both laptops and desktops, and Macs, or whatever your preference in gadgets, have known the likes of McAfee, AVG and Avast, a few of the anti-virus software which are consistently offered upon sale or for downloading. All the anti-virus items are there to protect the precious information a customer wants to keep from hackers or viruses from taking advantage of. Along with the rapid rise of devices that are able to access the Internet is also the proliferation of various malware which are beginning to target the more unprotected slice of the Internet pie: Your Web-savvy phone.