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
In my ever-widening circle of anti-cybercrime methodology this particular approach to attribution of the criminals looting the free world makes me particularly gleeful and I can’t wait to spread the good news: Security company HBGary today released an open source tool to digitally fingerprint malicious code and help identify the source of the malware. The
“Written in the form of a personal retrospective, this paper compares the earliest days of PC computer viruses with today’s threats, as well as provides a glimpse into the origins of the computer anti-virus industry.”
The attacks from cybercriminals are now occurring in the online stock and equity trading world. Instead of simply emptying out compromised brokerage accounts, cybercriminals apparently are refining their attacks and striking at broader and more lofty goals: the trust mechanisms of business equity valuations with publicly traded stocks and equities. George Hulme, InformationWeek contributing writer
Ouch. This affects virtually everyone including Mac, Linux, and Windows users. More can be found here at the PSIRT site. And yes, there is malware already associated already with it. A critical vulnerability exists in Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris operating systems, and the authplay.dll component that
In the survey, banks that were notifying consumers as quickly as possible or immediately across multiple channels performed well [and] they also improved cardholder confidence. Notifications over multiple channels were also significant.
Since the feed will be public and historic, there is a potential to research trends over the timeline, particularly as twitter is being used for more command and control functionality. As soon as it becomes available, we’ll follow up. :)
What would happen if every single one of the four BILLION cell phones on this planet just went dark? Or most likely, what would happen if every single cell phone went dark in one country? One scenario is a combined DoS attack on the internet was combined with a DoS attack on the cellular phone infrastructure at the same time.
Forbes contributor Richard Stennion doesn’t like the Cybersecurity Act of 2010 very much. We know it around here as S. 773 and have been tracking it for some time. Mr. Stennion and I disagree on some key points. He says that S. 773: “…contains some pretty drastic measures that are going to be very disruptive,
