Awhile back we mused that the rapid rise in Android malware would hit its stride near the intersection of widespread mobile financial transaction use, and the continuing steep rise in adoption of the platform. Now we see AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon entering a joint venture to back a payment service for, guess what: Mobile financial
You may be aware that Cameron Camp and I regularly write articles for SC Magazine's Cybercrime Corner: here here's a catch-up list of the most recent, in the hope that you might find them of use and interest. At any rate, it'll give some idea of the range of content covered. Ten years later, still the same
Nearly three years old, the Conficker worm continues to pose a threat to PCs. Aryeh Goretsky wants to know why this is, and what can be done about it.
Among the many different trojans that spread on Facebook, something popped up recently that caught our particular attention. The threat, detected by ESET as Win32/Delf.QCZ, is interesting for several reasons. Distribution First, let’s look at the distribution vector. Win32/Delf.QCZ relies on the old “fake codec/media player trick” and links to the malware-laden site are
The most common malware technique for avoiding detection is to create loads of “fresh” variants. Actually, the component that changes so frequently is the packer – the outer layer of the malware, used by malware authors to encrypt the malware and make it harder to detect – whilst the functionality of the malicious code inside
...one Yasuhiro Kawaguchi was arrested yesterday on suspicion of "saving a virus on his computer," though the story suggests distribution of malware too...
It's something of a truism, that 'old viruses never die', and that certainly seems to be the case for some of the older, more widespread, email worms. In this interview (http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041129/news_lz1b29five.html) back in 2004, I talked about an email worm called "Win32/Zafi.b" which, at the time, had recently been spreading on a global scale. However,
In a ComputerWorld article Gregg Kaiser cites a Microsoft engineer as saying that the trojan that Microsoft calls “Popureb” digs so deeply that the only way to eradicate it is to reinstall the operating system. If you read the Microsoft blog Feng didn’t actually say that this is the only way to eradicate the trojan.
Android Smartphones are under attack again by rogue applications that once installed are reading information from the phone and sending it back to a pre-assigned location. According to mobile security firm as many as 120,000 users may have been infected from a cafeteria selection of at least two dozen applications from the Android Market. “Once
Security companies in general and, unfortunately, anti-malware companies in particular, are often accused of ‘hyping’ threats because of a perceived self-interest. However, in the main, legitimate vendors and researchers like those at ESET typically try to resist overhyping or playing up threats where possible, in favor of more balanced discussion that can help customers take
Another day, another Facejack attack. We see a lot of these sorts of scams, alluringly titled posts – typically with a promise to show you who has been visiting your profile (or infamously, video of Osama Bin Laden's death) – that try to get you to click to see some special content. The latest one
An article came out yesterday from Clement Genzmer who is a security engineer at Facebook. His tagline is "searching and destroying malicious links". Those of us in the business of digital security and safety can certainly identify with that, especially the part where we aim to identify the criminals and work with law enforcement to
The death of Osama bin Laden has gone viral, with blogs, social media and search engines pumping terabytes of rumor, innuendo and conspiracy theories at the speed of light, along with the occasional kilobyte of truth. As the number of people searching for pictures and videos of bin Laden’s execution has skyrocketed, the criminal syndicates
[NOTE: As we were publishing this articl, our Latin American office discovered another Black Hat SEO campaign incorporating promises of Osama bin Laden videos on Facebook. Click here to view their article in Spanish. We will follow up on this shortly. AG] The malware phenomenon started by the announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death continues
Yesterday the U.S. president, Barak Obama, held a conference at the White House to announce that the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan. With no doubt, this is a story with an international impact, which the people will remember in the coming days and… attackers as well. As expected,
Aryeh Goretsky posted a blog about a trojan program in a Microsoft catalog update. I thought it might be a little interesting to know how this can happen and why it doesn’t happen more often. As it turns out, it was once my job to make sure that Microsoft did not release infected software. Initially
UPDATE #1 Randy Abrams has posted a follow-up article, Anatomy of a Biting Bunny – The Infected Microsoft Catalog Update with additional information about how update services work, why they might distribute third-party code and what might be done to prevent malware from being distributed on services like Microsoft’s Windows Update in the future. 7-FEB-2011.
It is generally well-understood that antimalware programs—the software which detects computer viruses, worms, trojan horses and other threats to your system—work by scanning files using signatures they already have. A signature could be as simple as a string[i] (like using the "find" command in your word processor to locate a particular piece of text) or as
Surprised to find annual cybercrime damage spread somewhere between 300 million and 54 BILLION? So is the Director of National Intelligence. Today Brian Krebs of the Washington Post and Krebsonsecurity.com detailed a strong push for mandatory disclosure of cyber intrusion to include account hijacking and online identity theft.
Now that cyberwarfare is out of the bottle, will anyone agree to not use it? In the summer of 1945 in New Mexico, the Trinity test gave rise to the term ground zero. Could Stuxnet may be measured as a definitive ground zero in cyberwarfare comparable to Trinity? Concerning Stuxnet’s latest rise in China, David
