Viruses & Malware

Is Vietnam the next haven for cybercrime? The country is apparently facing a major Internet security crisis, with some 95% of its PCs infected with viruses and 40% of its stock brokerages vulnerable to attack, according to officials there.

Officials from Vietnam’s Public Security Ministry told attendees at a security conference held there this week that security and data protection are at risk due to limited investment and spending on IT and security, as well a lack of awareness among users of Internet security threats, according to the People’s Daily Online.

From iPods to navigation systems, some of today's hottest gadgets are landing on store shelves with some unwanted extras from the factory — pre-installed viruses that steal passwords, open doors for hackers and make computers spew spam.

Computer users have been warned for years about virus threats from downloading Internet porn and opening suspicious e-mail attachments. Now they run the risk of picking up a digital infection just by plugging a new gizmo into their PCs.

Security researchers from McAfee have identified a trojan that attempts to extort money from owners of Symbian-based smartphones in China.

Some users believe that their Macs are absolutely invulnerable to viruses, trojans, and worms. Technical professionals, however, know that all OSes have some degrees of vulnerability. The MacForensicsLab, in concert with SubRosaSoft, has published a white paper on the state of Mac OS X malware with a mind towards educating users on the state of Mac system security. One observation was that a sense of false security can be very dangerous indeed.

An Arsenal fan site has been compromised to serve up sophisticated malware. Malicious code smuggled onto Onlinegooner.com redirected users to sites in Asia and Russia that download a wide variety of nasties onto vulnerable Windows PCs.

The downloaded malware contains a potent cocktail of rootkit, keylogging, backdoor, ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) poisoning, and DNS (Domain name system) spoofing capabilities.

The program is nasty. It deletes pictures and movies from your hard drive and then it teases you: "Even though Mr. Kaneko was found guilty, you are still using Winny. I really hate such people," taunts an animated woman on your screen.

Welcome to the age of localized malware. Over the past two years virus writers have increasingly targeted their malicious programs to users in different regions of the globe, creating programs that are specially designed to infect users in countries like Japan, Brazil, China or Germany.

Over 90 per cent of computer users believe that cyber-criminals will step up their attacks on Apple Macs in the future, according to a new poll.

However, half of respondents to the Sophos survey said that the problem will be as great as that faced by Windows users.

"Although we have seen the first attempts by criminal gangs to make money through Mac OS X malware, there are still only a tiny number of viruses and Trojans for Apple Macs compared to Windows," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

Cybercriminals may have weighed risk and reward and figured that the first isn't worth the second if they try to exploit the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, a security researcher at Symantec Corp. said today.

At least for now.

"We've now seen just two instances of spam using political candidates to spread malicious code," said Oliver Friedrichs, director of Symantec's security response team and a writer on electoral cybercrime. "I think [hackers] are still a little skittish. The high visibility of the federal elections makes them cautious about stepping into it."

Viruses and hacking on mobile phones are still rare but attacks are a looming danger as more people access the internet and download files with their handsets, experts say.

A survey released this week at the industry's Mobile World Congress showed that only 2.1 per cent of users had been hit by a virus themselves and only 11.6 per cent knew someone who had been affected by one.

The poll by IT security specialist McAfee, based on 2,000 people in Britain, the United States and Japan, showed that 86.3 per cent had had no experience of mobile phone viruses.

IT security and control firm Sophos is warning Linux users of the importance of properly securing their Linux systems, following findings from SophosLabs™ that a long established threat, known as Linux/Rst-B, is still infecting computers and servers.

Analysis of malware in Sophos's Linux honeypots have shown almost 70 percent of the infections are due to this six-year-old malicious program. Today, SophosLabs has made freely available a small detection tool to help Linux users find out whether they are unwittingly infected with this virus.