Google Worm Shows Bad Guys Want Efficiency, Too
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A new worm uses the search engine Google to find vulnerable systems, automatically connect to them, and deface a Web site. By Thomas Claburn.
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The Web is scarier than most people realize, according to research published recently by Google.The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.These Web-based attacks, called &quot;drive-by downloads&quot; by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers.In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore&#39;s An Inconvenient Truth movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim&#39;s browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim&#39;s PC. &quot;The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks,&quot; said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.Some of the data surprised Provos.&quot;When we started going into this, I had the firm intuition that if you go to the sleazier parts of the Web, you are in more danger,&quot; he said.It turns out the Web&#39;s nice neighborhoods aren&#39;t necessarily safer than its red-light districts.&quot;We looked into this and indeed we found that if you ended up going to adult-oriented pages, your risk of being exposed [to malicious software] was slightly higher,&quot; he said. But &quot;there really wasn&#39;t a huge difference.&quot;&quot;Staying away from the disreputable part of the Internet really isn&#39;t good enough,&quot; he noted.Another interesting finding: China was far and away the greatest source of malicious Web sites. According to Google&#39;s research, 67 percent of all malware distribution sites are hosted in China. The second-worst offender? The U.S., at 15 percent, followed by Russia (4 percent), Malaysia (2.2 percent), and Korea (2 percent).It costs next to nothing to register a Web domain in China and service providers are often slow to shut down malicious pages, said Thompson. &quot;They&#39;re the Kleenex Web sites,&quot; he said. Criminals &quot;know they&#39;re going to be shut down, and they don&#39;t care.&quot;Malicious site operators in China fall into two broad categories, Thompson said: Fraudsters looking to steal your banking password, and teenagers who want to steal your World of Warcraft character.So how to stop this growing pestilence?Google&#39;s Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic updates on. &quot;You should always run your software as updated as possible and install some kind of antivirus technology,&quot; he said.But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about building secure Web sites. &quot;I think it will take concentrated efforts on all parts,&quot; for the problem to go away, he said.
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New version of mass-mailing worm, discovered Friday, tries to disable defenses on destination PCs.
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Also: Hackers rig Google to deliver malware. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
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The Santy worm, which searches Google for sites that use a vulnerable version of the search engine&#39;s technology, is being tackled by Google.
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Blog: Although rare, a sophisticated attacker could perform a man-in-the-middle attack using Google Desktop.
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If malware were insects, botnets would be termites -- they burrow in behind the walls of your security perimeter, lie dormant for a period of time, then attack.
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A new worm can spy on users by hijacking their Web cameras, a security firm warned Monday. The Rbot.gr worm -- the latest in a long line of similar worms; one security firm estimates that more
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Domains of several new phishing sites are cropping up with known Storm worm domains. F-Secure researchers think phishers are leasing parts of the larger botnet.
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A bug in the Google Toolbar could allow criminals to steal data or install malicious software on a system, a security researcher warns.
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Sophisticated computer worm is setting up a botnet that may be hard to beat.
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Google, the paid-search advertising company, has been hit by a computer worm this week which used its website to disable potentially tens of thousands of internet notice boards.
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Google has responded to calls from antivirus firms to stop the spread of an Internet worm that was using the search engine&#39;s technology to spread among online bulletin boards.
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A worm that has the capability to using webcams to spy on users is circulating across the Net.
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Online crooks are constantly switching tactics in an attempt to invade your PC. Be on guard for these latest sneaky tricks.
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The sophisticated worm, known as W32.pipeline, is setting up a botnet and propagates when an AIM user clicks on a Web link apparently sent from someone in their buddy list.
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A new worm has been discovered in the wild that&#39;s not just settling for invading users&#39; PCs--it wants to invade their homes too.