Many of you have read the last few weeks that we published posts on trends for 2012 in the field of malware and cybercrime. In this series I wrote a post based on the document that the Education and Research team of ESET Latin America put together, entitled “2012 Predictions: More mobile malware and localized
As expected, malware developers and scam artists have greeted the death of North Korea's dictatorial leader, Kim Jong-il, with Black Hat SEO and Social Engineering attacks. The Supreme Leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea suffered a heart attack on a train journey last month and a steady stream of schemes to exploit the
This article was written in collaboration with my colleague Jean-Ian Boutin. The Wigon botnet (also known as Cutwail) is being used in a massive spam campaign. A multitude of ruses are used to get the user to click on a link: fake LinkedIn or Facebook notifications, free Windows licenses, fake deliveries etc. The links are
Java will consolidate its position as the successor to PDF and SWF in the favourite exploits stakes.
The FDIC is probably one of the most misunderstood quasi-governmental entities in America, which may account for its enduring popularity as part of malware and phishing scams. I'm not the most dedicated follower of banking news, but I did work for a bank once and I do try to keep up, yet I have never
Recently, a new data-stealing worm caught our attention. The reason why it stands out from many similar amateur creations is that its author is most probably Czech, as the text strings, variable and function names used by the malware suggest. The Czech text above is displayed by the worm inside a console window and translates
Yesterday, ESET announced the discovery of a new threat against the Apple Mac OS X platform. Today, we have found a new version of the same threat. The new version is similar to the previous version with two important differences. The first addition to this threat is that it now implements persistence on an infected
We’ve just come across an IRC controlled backdoor that enables the infected machine to become a bot for Distributed Denial of Service attacks. The interesting part about it is that it’s a Mach-O binary – targeting Mac OS X. ESET’s research team compared this to samples in our malware collection and discovered that this code
ESET had quite a strong representation at Virus Bulletin this year in Barcelona, as David Harley mentioned in his post prior to the conference. On the first day, Pierre-Marc Bureau presented his findings about the Kelihos botnet, David Harley and AVG’s Larry Bridwell discussed the usefulness and present state of AV testing, and to finish
On Saturday, another controversial report of a “government trojan” appeared. This time it is the German government that has been accused by the European hacker club Chaos Computer Club (CCC) of using “lawful interception” malware. Hence, “Bundestrojaner” (Federal Trojan), though that name is normally applied to the legal concept that allows German police to make
One of the blessings of Open Source initiatives is the rapidity with which coders can release quality collaborative code. This is one of the ways the Android managed to claw its way into the smartphone mainstream, after arriving late to the game. But as the app ecosystem matures, vulnerability/patch management becomes more of an issue,
There’s a new batch of malware making the rounds, this time directed at spreading banking malware through childrens’ games. Though it’s hard to imagine, the scammers are taking advantage of the naivete of kids, who may not be as skilled at detecting scams as their more seasoned parents. According to an article in Softpedia, the
New stolen digital certificates are used by the multi-purpose backdoor Qbot. The criminals behind the Qbot trojan are certainly not inactive. As I mentioned in a blog post earlier this month, after a quiet summer we have seen a batch of new Qbot variants. An interesting fact is that the malicious binaries were digitally signed.
A new trojan has been released targeting the Macintosh Chinese-language user community. The trojan appears to the user to be a PDF containing a Chinese language article on the long-running dispute over whether Japan or China owns the Diaoyu Islands. When the user opens the “PDF” file, it attempts to mask the installation
Recently, we’ve noted a steep rise in Android malware and predicted the rise in banking malware, now we see another example in the wild, this time SpyEye. Trusteer has a good rundown on it, saying “It seems that SpyEye distributors are catching up with the mobile market as they (finally) target the Android mobile platform.
ESET has discovered a new version of the Delphi infector, Win32/Induc. Unlike its predecessors, however, this variant incorporates a seriously malicious payload and has acquired some extra file infection and self-replicative functionality. Two years ago, we published comprehensive information (here , here, and here) about the virus Win32/Induc.A, which infected Delphi files at compile-time. Though
The authors of Win32/Qbot (a.k.a. Qakbot) are back with new variants of this infamous malware, and this time the binaries are digitally signed. Qbot is a multifunctional trojan that has had some significant impact in the past. It has also been around a while, with the first variants dating as far back as spring 2007,
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.
