Writing in the latest issue of Virus Bulletin (registration required), two Symantec researchers report what they believe is the first evidence of a major botnet consisting of compromised Macs. However other experts aren't so sure of the increased threat to Mac users.
Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, announces that a new version of the malicious program Kido (aka Conficker and Downadup) has been detected. During the night of 8th/9th April, computers infected with Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Kido (aka Conficker.c) contacted each other over P2P, telling infected machines to download new malicious files, thus activating the Kido botnet.
Security company Kaspersky Lab has identified 200,000 unique addresses in Conficker's peer-to-peer network - but the actual number of nodes affected is far higher.
New research by Kaspersky has re-opened the question of whether Conficker was hyped. While the Conficker worm generated an intense amount of public interest, the number of computers infected with the newest variant of the worm seems to be relatively small.
A new worm is rapidly spreading across microblogging site Twitter according to security firm Sopho. The worm hacks into Twitter profiles and automatically sends unauthorised Twitter status updates to contacts from the hacked accounts. Users who look at infected profiles are then automatically infected, and unauthorised posts are automatically sent to their contacts.
A computer security researcher has released a tool that can simplify the placement of difficult-to-detect malicious software in Microsoft's .Net framework on Windows computers. The tool, called .Net-Sploit 1.0, allows for modification of .Net, a piece of software installed on most Windows machines that allows the computers to execute certain types of applications.
Last year saw another staggering rise in malicious software, according to the latest EMEA Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec. The security firm logged over 1.6 million new threats, and warned that companies may be at increasing risk from attacks on smartphones.
The Conficker worm is back, said Tony Bradley in About.com. Two weeks ago, computer security experts warned that the evil malware known as Conficker was going to cripple the Internet on April 1, but “nothing really happened.” Now it appears that Conficker is delivering a new component to infected PCs—and there are millions of them—that will allow hackers to steal “sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, and more.”
A "worm" spreading spam messages promoting another website was first introduced into Twitter in the early hours of Saturday.
Despite efforts to curb the virus, Twitter was hit by a second, more intense, bout of attacks later in the day and another early on Sunday.
As a second Twitter exploit began circulating on the micro-blogging site Sunday, a teen-ager from Brooklyn told CNET News he created both worms to promote his Web site.
Much like Saturday's StalkDaily worm, the "Mikeyy" worm posts unwanted messages to users' pages. The "Mikeyy" worm began spreading on the micro-blogging site early Sunday, posting messages such as "Mikeyy I am done...," "MikeyyMikeyy is done.," and "Twitter please fix this, regards Mikeyy."
Two years ago, U.S. retailer TJX spent some US$130 million -- including US$65 million to two credit card companies -- to clean up the mess after the online theft from its computers of consumer data.
Had the company followed basic wireless security procedures the breach wouldn't have happened, Derek Manky,project manager for cybersecurity and threat research for security vendor Fortinet, told the IT360 technologyconference last week in Toronto.
