Cyber criminals are taking advantage of swine flu fears with emails promising news on the illness which then infect computers with a virus, a Spanish computer security firm warns.
The emails invite recipients to open a document with information claiming the H1N1 flu virus was developed by pharmaceutical firms seeking to make huge profits from the outbreak, Pandasecurity said in a statement.
When rootkits are mentioned the things which come to mind are generally hackers, Trojans, even Sony BMG. Now you can add open source software to the list with the release of the first open source rootkit framework called Stoned.
A rootkit is a piece of software which, for nefarious purposes, aims to run undetected on your computer. It will hide itself from process listings and will seek to interfere with the ordinary running of your system to fulfil its own purposes.
Rumors of a Fan Check virus have circulated in the Facebook community. The Kaspersky Lab two variants of Koobface viruses which (for now) are only attacking Facebook and MySpace users.
A computer virus crippled Ealing council's computer system for several days after the memory stick was plugged in at its housing department in west London on May 14.
A council report states: "At the point the memory stick was plugged in the virus attacked the host PC.
Users of the internet telephone service Skype are being advised to be cautious after the source code of a, so called, Trojan horse has been made available to the public. The Trojan is said to record telephone calls and sending the recordings to hackers.
A Trojan is a computer programme that tricks users to download it by pretending to be of use while really causing damage when installed on the computer.
According to the Internet security company 'PandaLabs,' about 52% of all newly released viruses, Trojans and worms remain on the Net for not even 24 hours before getting inactive.
Unfortunately, this tendency is not because Panda, Symantec or AVG, the firms for computer security, eradicate them with their own remarkable methods, but because virus creators are constantly shifting towards their successive major malware.
Just call it the throwback attack.
Reminiscent of the days when viruses were distributed on floppy disks, cybercriminals are currently mailing infected CDs to credit unions and smaller banks as part of a clever offline scheme to load malicious software into computers with valuable data.
According to an alert issued by the National Credit Union Association, a credit union reported receiving a bogus fraud advisory accompanied by two compact discs.
According to the BKIS (Bach Khoa Internet Security Center) of Vietnam, PC viruses have infected massive 5.3 Million computers in the country, with almost 3,300 viruses spreading infection during July 2009 alone.
Security researchers increasingly are finding that sites designed to trick the visitor into installing malicious software will serve different malware depending on whether the visitor arrives at the page using a Microsoft Windows PC or a Mac.
Conventional wisdom has it that mobile platforms like cellphones and PDAs are safer from malware (malicious software) attacks; one reason being the relatively closed nature of such platforms.
In some platforms, such as newer versions of the Symbian operating system, this is enforced in part by mandatory code signing which requires that applications need to be signed by a third party, ensuring (in theory) that they are not malicious.
