“Old hoaxes never die”: last year’s Christmas Tree App Facebook “virus” warning is circulating again.

What we’re lacking here is a clear differentiation between types of “hacktivist” or, indeed, “activist”: much of the commentary that’s around at the moment seems to assume that all hacktivists are the same.

The BBC program Panorama last night investigated claims that the News of the World hired a hacker to break into a subject's PC to steal emails. In fact, it appears that the unnamed hacker installed a Trojan on the victim's PC. Which sounds like a fairly unequivocal breach of the Computer Misuse Act, which outlaws

…keyloggers were found to have been attached to PCs used by members of the public…

Zeus-associated malware (and that includes SpyEye and “SpyZeuS”) isn’t supernaturally difficult to detect. It is, however, pretty adaptive and has introduced, from time to time, some innovative counter-detection techniques.

…conceptually there is a direct line of succession from this worm to the social engineering worm/Trojan hybrids of the early noughties. Clearly, the line continues through to the social network malware (real and memetic) of today…

Our friends at Virus Bulletin are hosting a seminar later this month … organized by the security-knowledgeable but vendor-agnostic magazine whose annual conference is one of the major highlights of an anti-malware researcher’s year.

…fake survey scam…

…you might wonder how a South American snake came to swallow an African mammal in the first place. (Don’t bother with the jokes about zoo viruses. I got there first.)

I've just blogged at a site that specializes in chainletter-related spam and scams about a 419-type spam  that masquerades as an email from the non-existent Frank Adam at the Civil Aviation Authority.,It's aimed at people whose air travel was disrupted by the Icelandic volcano, specifically those who found themselves stranded somewhere on mainland Europe. However, I thought