Miscreants have released a Trojan specially designed to disable cloud-based anti-virus security defences.
The Bohu blocks connections from infected Windows devices and cloud anti-virus services in place to protect them. Malware writers have long included routines to disable components of desktop anti-virus software packages or block access to anti-virus websites from infected machines.
A new worm is spreading on Twitter, according to a flood of reports circulating on the micro-blogging network this morning.
A number of users report that they've received spam messages from friends that included a web link using Google's goo.gl URL shortening service. Hovering over the malicious shortened link reveals that it leads to a URL ending with 'm28sx.html'.
Happy anniversary Basit and Amjad! Twenty-five years ago this month, the Alvi brothers of Lahore, Pakistan, gave the world the Brain Virus, the first bit of malware capable of infecting a DOS-based PC. Back in those relatively innocent times, the brothers actually embedded their real names and business address in the code and later told Time magazine they had written the virus to protect their medical software from piracy.
Computer security firm Sophos released a warning this week that hackers are spreading a new damaging computer virus with a file that promises a PowerPoint presentation of sexual positions from the Kama Sutra.
Graham Cluley of Sophos said in an online post that Internet surfers need to be wary about what they do “with that mouse.”
“When you click on the file you do get to see a real PowerPoint presentation, but in the background a backdoor Trojan called Troj/Bckdr-RFM is installed which allows hackers to gain remote access to your computer,” said Cluley.
Israel has tested a computer worm believed to have sabotaged Iran's nuclear centrifuges and slowed its ability to develop an atomic weapon, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
In what the Times described as a joint Israeli-U.S. effort to undermine Iran's nuclear ambitions, it said the tests of the destructive Stuxnet worm had occurred over the past two years at the heavily guarded Dimona complex in the Negev desert.
A fast-spreading Russian ransom worm that locks people out of their files has found at least 2,500 victims willing to pay up to get back control of their PCs, researchers have discovered.
The malware is identified by Trend Micro as Worm_Rixobot.A, which says it has been spreading in recent weeks using infected porn websites, instant messaging applications and even infected USB drives, hence its designation as a worm rather than a Trojan.
Just a day after Apple launched the Mac App Store to generally positive reviews, reports that the copy protection may have been hacked have begun to surface. In addition, several developers may have improperly secured their apps, making the pirator's job that much easier.
A group calling itself "Hackulous" said that it has developed a program called Kickback which circumvents the DRM methods used by Apple. However, the group is holding off public release of the application until the Mac App Store builds a larger library.
More than a third of all malware that has ever existed was created by criminal gangs in 2010 alone according to the latest PandaLabs Annual Report.
To be precise, the company found that 34 percent of all existing malware has been concocted by cyber-criminals in the last year, banishing forever the image of the disgruntled geek creating viruses in his bedsit.
It's Tuesday, time for more security patches from Microsoft right? Not quite. It seems the malware crowd is exploiting Microsoft's routine of releasing fixes on Tuesdays and sending out fake security emails bent on infecting their targets with a worm.
Windows users familiar with Microsoft's modus operandi will sniff out this scam immediately, though, and not only because of the cracked English in the message. The missive contains the security update in an attachment. Microsoft never sends security updates in attachments.
According to researchers from antivirus vendor Trend Micro, the most remarkable threat for last year was by far the Stuxnet industrial espionage worm, which managed to get ahead other more long-running threats.
Stuxnet was discovered this summer, but it is believed to have existed since mid-2009. It is widely considered in the malware research community as the most sophisticated computer threat created to date.
