Viruses & Malware

A Trojan is introducing malware into thousands of computer systems worldwide, and the number is growing by the hour.

The malware is being introduced by MSN Messenger files posing as pictures, mostly seeming to come from known acquaintences. The files are a new type of Trojan that has snared several thousand PCs for a bot network within hours of its launch earlier today, and is being used to discover virtual PCs as a means of increasing its growth vector.

Steamy Chinese film "Lust, Caution" has not only been a smash-hit at the box office but has also been spreading online viruses, state media reported.

At least hundreds of websites, online forums and blogs are themed "Lust, Caution" and about 15 per cent of them have been attacked by hackers and carry virus, official Xinhua news agency said.

Netizens who download the film are very likely see their computers hit by virus, it said.

Storm, the botnet-building Trojan horse, has come up with another twist to dupe users into infecting their PCs with malware, a security researcher said today.

Longtime clients of the Russian Business Network (RBN), a notorious hacker- and malware-hosting network that mysteriously vanished last week after shifting operations from St. Petersburg, Russia, to Shanghai are involved in the attack, said Paul Ferguson, network architect at Trend Micro Inc.

Web 2.0 technologies may be laying the groundwork for a new generation of hacker tools, a noted security researcher said Wednesday. Google Mashups, RSS feeds, search, all of these can be misused by hackers to distribute malware, attack Web surfers and communicate with botnets, said Petko Petkov, a security researcher speaking at the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) U.S. 2007 conference, held on eBay's campus.

Visitors to IndiaTimes.com, a major English-language Indian news site, risk infecting their computers with a deluge of malware, according to Mary Landesman, senior security researcher at ScanSafe. "It's an entire cocktail of downloader Trojans and dropper Trojans," Landesman said Friday, putting the number of malicious files involved at 434. This includes scripts, binaries, cookies, and images.

If users thought the Mac-targeted trojan discovered last week was a one-off, they'll need to think again -- security firm F-Secure has discovered 32 variants of it, but claims about its powers have been wildly overstated, acccording to experts.

"Looks like the Mac Trojan we posted about last week was not an isolated incident. The gang behind it seems serious about targeting Mac users as well as Windows users. And they keep putting out slightly modified versions of the Trojan for the Mac too," writes Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure.

Apple Mac users are no longer immune to Trojan attacks, after a Texas-based Mac security firm, reported the first serious Trojan to affect the Apple Mac platform.

Users may be forced to contact their IT suppliers to protect themselves.

The Trojan targets a computer's DNS server and adds a malicious entry that intercepts and re-routes web requests to malware-ridden and/or porn sites.

Hackers and malware creators are clearly taking a greater degree of interest in the ever growing community of Mac owners with the discovery of the OSX.RSPlug.A Trojan masquerading as a video plug-in at some porn sites, diverting some of their attention away from the Windows world to try their hand at hacking the Mac. Now more than ever with the launch of Leopard, any of Apple’ Mac models are excellent, multipurpose computers that are easy to use, have a wealth of native software available, are fully compatible with PCs right down to native or virtual running of Windows.

Computer users here seem to have been more successful at fending off hackers than those in several other neighbouring countries, according to a recent survey.

Malaysia is sixth on a list of Asia Pacific countries that have reported bot-infected computers, revealed Symantec Corp’s latest biannual Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR).

The survey showed that only 1% of computers in the country had been infected during the six-month period from January to June.

The security analysts have just made a public announcement that is likely to be very important for all of us: the analysts have warned about a new malicious software program that is masquerading an installer file for the popular Skype service. The program is, obviously, a trojan in fact and it sends its victims’ Skype credentials, as well as any authentication elements, such as the logins and passwords that are stored in the Internet Explorer browser, to another server.