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The news broke a short time ago that pop star Michael Jackson died of a heart attack. It is all too predictable that the bad guys will use this news event to spam out fake videos or links to alleged pictures in order to trick users into installing their malicious software. If you receive an
The City of Bozeman, Montana effectively joined the ranks of phishers when they asked job candidates for their usernames and passwords for social networking sites that the applicant belongs to. In a report at , after considerable outcry the city rescinded its mindless policy. To begin with, the city was asking applicants to breach their
When I first went to university at the end of the 1960s (yes, I really am that old, though not quite old enough to be of that generation that only remembers that decade through a haze of psychedelic phenomena), my choice of social sciences was regarded as somewhat fluffy. It was the age of “the
Just last Saturday, June 6th; there was a new posting on the Full Disclosure mailing list from a source that calls themselves pwnmobile (at least that’s part of their email address). In the post, pwnmobile claims they have harvested information from T-Mobile USA’s servers. The data they claim to have acquired is: various databases confidential
Some of you may have recently read of researchers discovering a botnet that is using Mac computers. Are you surprised? Well, perhaps if you drink the Apple flavored Kool-Aid you are, but if you understand operating systems at all then this is really not at all surprising. Operating systems are designed to run programs. A
We all have recently endured a week or so of extensive media hype about a worm called “Conficker”. Phrases such as “One of the worst viruses ever” and other such nonsense were tossed around like promises at a political rally, with about the same level of honesty and accuracy, perhaps even less. Conficker was already
When I write about Mac issues, I usually find myself abused by individuals convinced that there are no Mac viruses, never were any Mac viruses, and never could be any Mac viruses. Less advanced cases sometimes admit that there is Mac malware (and malware that isn’t Mac-specific, but can affect Mac users), but buy into
I’ve mentioned here before that targeted malware, often delivered by “spear phishing” carried by apparently “harmless” documents such as PDFs, .DOCs and spreadsheets rather than overt programs, can have much more impact than the raw numbers of such attacks suggest. In fact, some sources now use the term “whaling” rather than “spear phishing” to reflect the
I just picked up a comment made today on a post Randy made about the comparative security of Macs and PCs. Since the original post goes back to 2006, it seems a pity to bury the comment on a page most people won’t get to. In fact, since the comment reproduces an article in PC
Someone raised an interesting point in a comment to yesterday’s blog about Symantec’s own PIFTS.EXE being flagged by their own firewall as a possible problem. Let me quote the comment in full. I by no means buy into the super root-kit routine, I do however think that there will be copy cats (if not already)
I recently had the fantastic opportunity to participate on a panel discussion concerning cyber security. The event was hosted by the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce and coordinated by the US Chamber of Commerce and the Department of Homeland Security. Last year the Bush administration launched the Comprehensive National Cyber security Initiative or CNCI. Although focused
As Valentine’s Day is approaching the criminals behind Win32/Waledac have increased their activity. The Valentine campaign started some time ago but the interesting part is only starting for us. The Waledac botnet has been using fast flux for some time now. This means that the IP addresses of the websites used to distribute this malware
Back in January I blogged about a shortcoming of HIPAA. HIPAA legislation is, in part, supposed to help protect our privacy when dealing with health care providers. Unfortunately there is a hole in the legislation that you can fly a Boeing 747 through. May of us have to log on to a web site to
Here at ESET we have just released our Global ThreatTrends report for January 2009. Not surprisingly, at the top of the list is a family of programs that exploit Microsoft’s longest unpatched vulnerability. That’s right, Autorun.inf, is an evil “feature” that should have been patched out of existence a long time ago. Since it is
Well, this actually isn’t a lie, but a lot of what you read on the web are lies designed to steal money or identities. If you go to a web page and it says you need a new codec or new software to view a video or picture, or pretty much anything, the odds are
…no promise of chicks for free, but I did get spam this morning offering me a “Free-Trial kit” for some scheme for “making money through the Internet by doing almost nothing” (probably some sort of pyramid scheme, I guess, updated with a reference to using Google). While I’m not about to take up the offer, I
You may have noticed that I’ve been making a lot of references to this over the past few weeks. You can now download it here. Quite a few people have worked pretty hard to make this project happen, and I’d like to thank them now. I hope some of you will find it interesting and
Today is inauguration day in the USA. As I traveled to many countries late last year I was amazed at how joyous people of many cultures were that Obama is to be President of the USA. Working in the security field, we see a lot of disappointment. Sometimes it seems that there is no hope
The top ten (twenty, twenty-five…) season doesn’t seem to have finished yet: the latest to cross my radar was something like seven ways of surviving the recession, which I’m sure is of interest to all of us, but not really in scope for this blog. So here’s a snippet from our 2008 Global Threat Report,
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