Mac security firm Intego blogged about Apple’s decision to include an antimalware component in Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" and we agree that it is a good step, security-wise, to provide some basic protection against malware. Apple has long mocked Microsoft, up to and including this 2006 advertisement which implied there were no viruses
In previous blogs, I mentioned that some of the presentations from the CARO workshop a couple of weeks ago were likely to be made available publicly. Unfortunately for non-attendees, most of the presentations are only available to people who were there: however, some can be downloaded by the public from here. In case I didn’t
As The Register has pointed out, the Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification for March 2009 doesn’t mention a forthcoming patch for the Excel vulnerability we’ve already flagged in this blog here and here and here. Since, as John Leyden remarks, the exploit is being actively exploited, it may seem that Microsoft are not taking the issue seriously
Further to our blog last week on targeted attacks exploiting a vulnerability found in a number of Excel versions including Mac versions, viewers, and the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac. While we already have a specific detection for the threat we call X97M/TrojanDropper.Agent.NAI, we also have generic detection for the exploit, flagged as X97M/Exploit.CVE-2009-0238.Gen. This detection
You might have noticed that Conficker (Downadup) is actually standing up rather well to all the attention it’s receiving at the moment. Heise UK reported that 2.5 million PCs are already infected (links removed, as Heise no longer seems to have a UK site and the articles have disappeared). In The Register, Dan Goodin reports that the
CNN reported that there a new sleeper virus out there. http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/ptech/01/16/virus.downadup/index.html There is nothing sleepy about the Conficker worm, it is wide awake and looking for people who are asleep at the security wheel. CNN reports that Conficker could allow hackers to steal personal and financial data, and they also report that it “it is
Not one of our Top X lists, this time, but one featured in an article on the SANS site. SANS have been banging the drum for safer coding for quite a while – in fact, they do quite a few courses on safe coding in various development contexts. Admittedly, that gives them a financial incentive to fly
Update: Graham Cluley’s issued a blog post a couple of days ago suggesting that so far, at least some of the phishes described in our earlier blog about Twitter phishing have been used for old style defacement purposes rather than out-and-out fraud. (I suspect, though, that now this latest phishing genie is out of the bottle, there
Don’t trust unsolicited files or embedded links, even from friends. It’s easy to spoof email addresses, for instance, so that email appears to come from someone other than the real sender (who/which may in any case be a spam tool rather than a human being). Basic SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) doesn’t validate the sender’s
Here’s the second instalment of the “ten ways to dodge cyberbullets” that I promised you. Keep applications and operating system components up-to-date with automated updates and patches, and by regularly reviewing the vendors’ product update sections on their web sites. This point is particularly relevant right now, given the escalating volumes of Conficker that we’re
It’s that time of year when everyone wants a top ten: the top ten most stupid remarks made by celebrities, the ten worst-dressed French poodles, the ten most embarrassing political speeches, and so on. Our research team came up with a few rather more serious ideas, most of which are considered at some length in our about-to-be-published
It probably isn’t news to you that there’s been an issue with Internet Explorer and a recently-discovered vulnerability that exposes users of the application to a range of attacks. Certainly we’ve been getting lots of enquiries about our ability to detect it, and I suspect other vendors are getting the same barrage of questions. Of
