A video made of ESPN reporter Erin Andrews undressing in her hotel room is now being used to spread a computer virus, according to sophos.com, an anti-virus software company.
A video of Andrews undressing was shot through the peephole of her hotel room and then quickly made its way to the internet in recent days. Soon after websites cropped up claiming to be links to the video but were actually a way to release a virus into the user's system.
The warning follows an order by the Monetary Authority on Monday demanding that banks step up online banking security after three clients, from two banks, lost HK$289,000 between April and June from unauthorised online transactions. Eight banks have reported being targeted.
The customers who lost money were believed to have accessed their online banking accounts using personal computers infected with Trojan horse programs that record keystrokes and send the information to a hacker. The hacker then logged in to the account using the stolen usernames and passwords.
Creators of Waledac malware have used the Conficker botnet as a tool to spread malware of their own, marking the first time Conficker was made available for hire, according to Cisco.
Writing in its mid-yearly security report, Cisco said that this was symptomatic of a wider trend of malware purveyors using established business practices to expand their illegal enterprises. Cisco likened the arrangement between Waledac and Conficker to a partner ecosystem, a term Cisco uses to describe its collaboration with other vendors.
The Conficker botnet was by far the largest source of online attacks on the web in the first quarter of 2009, according to web services provider Akamai.
The company's quarterly 'state of the internet' report found that in the first months of the year, Conficker accounted for some two thirds of all attack traffic.
First appearing in late 2008, Conficker spread throughout the web in 2009. By March, the worm touched off a media firestorm when researchers noted that many of the infected machines were programmed to dial an instruction server on April 1.
The viruses caused appointments to be rescheduled without any prior notice given to patients, the loss of test results and NHS staff to be locked out of their computers for several days. There is also the concern that personal information could have been at risk of theft, because the viruses that infected the computers are also used by hackers to steal personal information.
A new malware attack for MacOS X systems has been spotted in the wild. Known informally as 'Puper,' the trojan attack disguises itself as a video program for OS X systems called "MacCinema."
According to researchers at McAfee Avert Labs, the attack appears as a disk image which then launches an installer application for the fictional 'MacCinema' software. Once the installer completes its task, the user becomes infected with a script file named 'AdobeFlash'.
Cybercriminals are experimenting with a new feature introduced in one of the latest Koobface variants - the ability of the worm to hijack the Twitter accounts of infected users and post tweets in an attempt to infect their followers.
According to researchers from TrendMicro, once the infected user attempts to log into Twitter, Koobface hijacks the session and posts a tweet on behalf of the user. Would this novel feature allow the worm to spread even more efficiently? It largely depends on whether or not they’d remove the beta label from it, and go mainstream with the feature.
Users of weather.bm who attempted to look at radar imagery, instead discovered a virus on the official website of the Bermuda Weather Service. Site manager Logic Communications quickly took down the page and removed the virus. A short time later, the site was fully operational again.
"We're looking at the logs to find out how it got there," said the company's marketing vice president Paul Coleman. It is believed that the virus was placed by hackers. One user told The Royal Gazette that they had accessed the website at around 9 a.m. and suffered the effects of the virus.
While the world has been busy mourning Michael Jackson’s demise, spammers have been trying to exploit his death. Spammers are sending schmaltzy emails eulogizing the King of Pop. Under the garb of emotions is camouflaged some bad old malware.
“The e-mail, which claims to come from sarah@michaeljackson.com, says that the attached ZIP file contains secret songs and photos of Michael Jackson,” Sophos senior tech consultant Graham Cluley wrote about one such email in recent blog entry.
Conficker may not dominate the headlines any longer, but it's still going strong, according to Trend Micro's Malware Blog and stats from the Conficker Working Group.
The worm/botnet grabbed plenty of attention earlier this year, and I wrote plenty about it myself. Part of that focus came from its giant infection rate, part from its sophisticated techniques, and part was pure hype. And after a ballyhooed April Fool's day threat came and went with little incident, it seemed to largely vanish from the public eye.
