Companies are wasting money on security processes — such as applying patches and using antivirus software — which just don't work, according to Cisco's chief security officer John Stewart.
Speaking at the AusCERT 2008 conference in the Gold Coast yesterday, Stewart said the malware industry is moving faster than the security industry, making it impossible for users to remain secure.
Nearly half of the respondents in a Virus Bulletin poll said they thought that virus-writing contests are a useful way of highlighting issues with anti-virus products - while 12 per cent felt that such contests are nothing but harmless fun.
Last month, the organisers of the annual Defcon hackers' convention announced the Race to Zero contest, to be held at the 16th Defcon conference in August this year. In the contest, participants will be provided with existing virus code, which they are required to modify so that it will not be detected by the available anti-virus scanners.
Hundreds of Grand Theft Auto IV fans eager to get their hands on a free copy of the game have been targeted by a Trojan virus, according to DriveSentry.
Hackers planted the virus in bogus game files, which are being illegally downloaded from P2P networks by those keen to experience the game without purchasing it.
John Safa, chief technical officer of DriveSentry, said: "People are exploiting the popularity of GTA IV in a way which could bring mayhem to the internet."
Kaspersky’s senior virus analyst has warned of ‘unpleasant news’ from the world of mobile malware in its latest quarterly security trend report.
Alexander Gostev, senior virus analyst at Kaspersky Lab and author of Malware Evolution: January – March 2008, has revealed that in the first three months of 2008, innovation and quantity of new malicious programs targeting mobile phones have increased.
Most operating systems were targeted; namely Symbian, Windows Mobile, J2ME (Java platform) and the popular iPhone.
Mozilla, the maker of the open source Firefox browser, is redoubling its efforts to check user created add-ons for viruses and Trojans after it discovered that a language pack on its official add-on page had been infected for months with rogue code, the organization reported Wednesday.
Starting in mid-Feburary, Vietnamese users of Mozilla's open source Firefox browser were at risk of infection from malicious Trojan Horse code seemingly accidentally embedded in a language pack available on its Add-ons site.
Hundreds of thousands of examples of a new Trojan that poses as a media file have flooded onto P2P networks.
Since Friday 2 May more than half a million instances of the Trojan have been detected on consumer PCs, according to net security firm McAfee. The anti-virus firm reports the spread of the Downloader-UA.h Trojan as the most significant malware outbreak in the last three years.
The Trojan is being used to serve ads onto contaminated PCs as part of an apparent money-making scam.
Whoops! That's what Yahoo is saying, or at least should be saying, after it was discovered that some of their banner ads have been serving up malware. While nobody would assume that Yahoo would endorse peddling nasty software to people’s machines, the article asserts that the technical teams at Yahoo might not even be aware that there is a problem. It seems that certain banner ads are hosted on or are contacting servers that produce pop-ups eerily similar to Windows dialogs.
Email targeted attacks, oldies but goodies and hackers always choose something that is in popular worldwide news, such as the Olympics and all the drama regarding the torch relays in certain locations. MessageLabs has revealed new research showing 13 separate Olympic themed attacks.
Subject lines such as "The Bejing 2008 Torch Relay" and "National Olympic Committee and Ticket Sales" with some claiming to be from the International Olympic Committee based in Switzerland but were really sent from somewhere in the Asian Pacific region
Researchers at Damballa Solutions have uncovered evidence of a powerful new botnet they've nicknamed Kracken. The company estimates that Kraken has infected 400,000 systems, which would make it twice the size of Storm during that botnet's hayday. (The final size of Storm's botnet is disputed; Damballa estimates Storm infected up to 200,000 machines).
Interesting to read that MessageLabs has revealed a Russkie malware infections site that offers wodges of e-cash depending on how many PCs - and their location- hackers can infect with its spyware.
The spyware infections are reported to be a doddle to engineer on legitimate sites, using a single line of code to route hapless punters onto auto-malware loading pages,
