Viruses & Malware

Spammers are using cloud-based storage services to store malware, allowing them to circumvent e-mail spam filters, according to security experts at Kaspersky Lab and MX Lab.

Hackers are aiming for users of Google's Android mobile operating system with a malicious application that harvests personal information and sends it to a remote server.

The malware, which has been named "Geinimi," appears to be the first one that has botnet-like capabilities targeted at the Android platform, said Kevin Mahaffey, chief technology officer for Lookout Mobile Security, which develops mobile security software.

I'm not answering a particular reader question this time around, although a recent forum discussion inspired me to write this post. I hear a lot from people with unbootable computers. Maybe they get a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) with every boot. Or the PC shuts down before Windows finishes loading. Sometimes an error message tells them that there's no operating system on their hard drive, or no hard drive at all. A great many of these users assume that a "virus" is to blame.

Perhaps one of the most common predictions of the last six years has been that mobile malicious software will suddenly proliferate, driven by widespread adoption of smartphones with advanced OSes.

None of those prognostications have really come to fruition, but it's likely that the coming year will bring a host of new malicious applications. Users -- while generally aware of threats aimed at their desktop computers and laptops -- have a good chance of being caught flat-footed with their mobile phones.

New malware strains designed specifically for smartphones surged 33 percent this year and will surely increase dramatically in 2011 as more smartphones and tablet PCs enter the consumer and business markets.
As Enterprise Mobile Today reports, Android-powered smartphones were particularly hard hit this year hackers acknowledged the devices' growing popularity and adjusted accordingly.

Security software vendors know just how frustrating and difficult it is to say one step ahead of malware authors and hackers looking for the next sneaky way to access enterprise data networks and steal consumers' identities.
But as eSecurity Planet reports, a new survey by Avira this week found something even more disturbing: one in four people admit they turned off the AV software at least once in the past year in effort to improve the performance of their PCs.

Ads served by DoubleClick (Google) and MSN (Microsoft) were distributing drive-by malware last week after attackers were able to trick the networks using a ploy from the phishers' playbook: they masqueraded as a legitimate advertising provider by using a domain name that looked the same as the provider's.

he Sydney branch of West Coast Labs' global honeynet was amongst the first to record two new malware variants last week, as the RBot family continued to wreak havoc on global networks.

Of the 41 malware threats detected by West Coast Labs' Sydney honeypots last week, 29 were received there for the first time. Two were brand new threats on a global level: a variant of the Allaple family and another of the Virut family.

Security experts are warning web users to be on their guard after discovering two attacks using the WikiLeaks scandal as a social engineering hook.

Symantec Hosted Services malware operations engineer Tony Millington wrote in a blog post that a new virus has been disguised as a PDF attachment named 'WikiLeaks' in a highly targeted attack aimed at a government body.

A new worm is spreading on twitter through cunning Goo.gl links, various reports confirm.

The news broke out last night as people started tweeting and warning other people from clicking on an “http://goo.gl/” link ending in either “R7f68” or “od0az” after media outlets like The Next Web and Mashable warned people that the link directs to malicious sites.