malware

According to the report by security vendor M86 Security one of the largest botnets which is the Pushdo or Cutwail network was taken down and as a result the amount of spam decreased significantly. But it is believed that the botnet will retrieve in a matter of weeks.

Russian police launched an investigation into a criminal gang that installed malicious "ransomware" programs on thousands of PCs and then forced victims to send SMS messages in order to unlock their PCs. According to local reports that scam may have brought Russian criminals millions of dollars.

Russian police seized computer equipment and detained a Russian "crime family" in connection with the crime. 10 people are expected to be charged. Tens of thousands victims affected by the scam live in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova.

According to a report by the Internet security firm AVG 7 of the 10 safest countries in which to use the Internet are in Africa, with Sierra Leone rated the safest. Researchers of the security vendor made up a list of virus and malware attacks by country picked up by AVG security software, with data from more than 127 million computers in 144 countries to determine incidence rates of such attacks. Average incident rate for Sierra Leone was one attack for every 692 Web surfers.

Sierra Leone was followed by Niger with one in every 442 surfers likely to be attacked while online.

The first exploits have been released targeting programs including the Firefox browser, uTorrent BitTorrent client, and Microsoft PowerPoint, a day after Microsoft affirmed a vulnerability in Windows applications, executing malicious code on end-user PCs. 

A new malware was developed by cyber crooks to lure unwitting users into uninstalling legitimate anti-virus applications and instead using fake and useless software. A bogus package dubbed AnVi Antivirus generates a message that suggest that legitimate apps are “uncertified" and ought to be removed. Further the message threatens that if a user fails to take action his/her computer performance will degrade.

This year Cameron Diaz took the first place in the list of most dangerous search clues to be typed in the search engine query according to an annual McAfee report. Last year the top of the list was occupied by Jessica Biel.

If you look for any of the celebrities in the McAfee's annual list of the most dangerous stars to search for on the Web you risk to have a virus installed on your PC after you press some links in the search results.

A new type of clickjacking was recently noticed and removed on Facebook. The new “Share” attack relied on luring unwitting users into opening a "Facebook fan page" for the “Top 10 Funny T-Shirt Fails ROFL” and other potentially eye-catching content. Once selected these bogus pages load malicious script from an external domain that means the user will unwittingly share the dodgy page on their profile, promoting the scam to a mark's friends and contacts on Facebook.

Over 1 million webpages were infected in the course of an attack that can expose users to malware exploits. Among these websites there are at least two that belong to Apple. The SQL injection attacks bombard the websites of legitimate companies with database commands that attempt to add hidden links that lead to malware exploits.

Security software vendor warns that a gaming app in Google’s Android Market which disguises itself as a video game in fact traces users’ whereabouts and secretly transfers the data to third parties.

The free app known as Tapsnake every 15 minutes uploads the user's GPS coordinates to a server that can be monitored by people running a separate $4.99 app known as GPS Spy, which is made by the same developer shop.

Crooks have introduced a new phishing scam on Facebook. Now the members are offered to participate in a survey that poses as a curmudgeonly response to the social network's 'Like' button. The technique used in the scam is similar to previous lures like including "Justin Bieber trying to flirt" and (unrelated, you mucky minded lot)) "the biggest and scariest snake" (aka 'Anaconda coughs up a hippo') scam.

Smartphones are increasingly getting infected with different kind of malware and now they are even involved into botnets, as latest reports show.

Waledac botnet that was taken down in February this year is again waking up. As is known the court order ruled to close Waledac-related domains, depeer the botnet's peer-to-peer communications and take down the server.

While it may seem that Microsoft’s operation brought a success it was only superficial as it did nothing to clean up estimated 90,000 infected bot clients. While they were depeered they waited for their time to get up again.

The first malicious software that targets specifically Google’s Android operating system has been discovered by researchers at the security company Kaspersky Lab. According to the company blogpost the malware masquerades as a media player but in fact it secretly sends premium SMSes once it is installed on the device.

According to a recent study by Cyveillance anti-virus software may be more inefficient than believed. The research revealed that on average security vendors detect only 19% of malware attacks on the first day it appears in the wild. Even after 30 days the rate is just 61.7%.

As a solution Cyveillance recommends users to practice safe computing which includes avoiding suspicious and unknown destinations with increased browser settings as a way to decrease to a minimum the risks instead of only relying on anti-virus technologies.