New Study Finds Many US Home PCs Infected
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When technicians examined the PCs of 329 respondents, they found 80 percent loaded with dozens of spyware programs that track the user&#39;s browsing habits.
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Some digital picture frames and other devices sold over the holidays may include malware.
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Program isn't entirely benevolent: it also downloads files to infected PCs.
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WASHINGTON - Internet users at home are not nearly as safe online as they believe, according to a nationwide inspection by researchers.
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Computer security experts estimate that tens of millions of personal computers are infected with malicious software. Some are keyloggers, recording every key stroke that the user enters -- sending valuable bank account information, passwords and credit card numbers to hackers.
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Unpatched Windows machines are vulnerable to latest adware attack
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Cell phone users beware: A barrage of new electronic viruses is headed your way, security experts warn. The pathogens are variations of the &quot;Cabir&quot; worm discovered last summer infecting some
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Computer users could stop most viruses and cyber attacks by fixing a small number of common flaws, according to new research. Viruses, spam and distributed denial of service attacks could
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The number of new viruses and worms aimed at Microsoft Corp.&#39;s (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) ubiquitous Windows operating system rose 400 percent between January and June from the same year-earlier period, leading computer
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Security researchers studying the latest Internet crime trends have discovered a new Eastern European website that uses a large botnet to infect vulnerable PCs. The operators of the botnet and website charge clients for each successful PC infection.
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A survey conducted by Internet service provider America Online Inc. (AOL) found that 20 percent of home computers were infected by a virus or worm, and that various forms of snooping programs such as spyware and adware are on a whopping 80 percent of systems. Despite that, more than two thirds of home users think they are safe from online threats.
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Criminals deploy zombies herded into netwoks of a few hundred to more than half a million compromised PCs. Uses vary from the simply annoying (spam attacks) to the unsavory and criminal.
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The&#160;Storm Worm&#39;s days may be numbered, according to a University of California researcher.Brandon Enright, a network security analyst at UC San Diego, has been tracking Storm since July and said that, despite the intense publicity that the network of infected computers has received, it&#39;s actually been shrinking steadily and is presently a shadow of its former self. On Saturday, he presented his findings at the Toorcon hacker conference in San Diego.Storm is not really a computer worm. It&#39;s a network of computers that have been infected via malicious e-mail messages, and are centrally controlled via the Overnet P-to-P protocol. Enright said he has developed software that crawls through the Storm network and he thinks that he has a pretty accurate estimate of how big Storm really is.Some estimates have put Storm at 50 million computers, a number that would give its controllers access to more processing power than the world&#39;s most powerful supercomputer. But Enright said that the real story is significantly less terrifying. In July, for example, he said that Storm appeared to have infected about 1.5 million PCs, about 200,000 of which were accessible at any given time.Enright guessed that a total of about 15 million PCs have been infected by Storm in the nine months it has been around, although the vast majority of those have been cleaned up and are no longer part of the Storm network.Since July, it&#39;s been downhill for Storm. That&#39;s when antivirus vendors began stepping up their tracking of Storm variants and got a lot better at identifying and cleaning up infected computers, Enright said.Then on September 11, Microsoft added Storm detection (Microsoft&#39;s name for Storm&#39;s components is Win32/Nuwar) into its Malicious Software Removal tool, which ships with every Windows system. Overnight, Storm infections dropped by another 20 percent.Today, Enright said that Storm is about one-tenth of its former size. His most recent data counts 20,000 infected PCs available at any one time, out of a total network of about 160,000 computers. &quot;The size of the network has been falling pretty rapidly and pretty consistently,&quot; he said.Still, Storm has had a remarkably successful run. It&#39;s called Storm because it first popped up in mid-January in spam e-mails that offered late-breaking information on powerful storms that had been battering Europe. Users who clicked on the &quot;Full Story.exe&quot; or &quot;Video.exe&quot; attachments that accompanied the spam were infected by malicious software, making them part of the Storm network.These machines were then used to send out more spam and launch attacks against other computers. The recent MP3 stock spam that was first spotted earlier this week was sent out by the Storm network, Enright said.Storm was effective because its creators were really good at creating messages that victims would feel compelled to click, Enright said. In its first few days, it managed to infect more than 300,000 computers, making it the worst malware outbreak since 2005. Its creators have since been masters at creating timely messages for their spam and have also had success getting victims to click on fake e-greeting cards.The Storm network itself is constantly changing, and has used a variety of technologies that have made it an interesting phenomenon to study. In addition to the peer to peer network, it has used rootkit software to disguise its presence on the PC and a server-switching technique called &quot;fast-flux,&quot; which makes the Storm servers harder to find on the network.It&#39;s also developed some interesting ways of keeping researchers like Enright at bay. &quot;If you&#39;re a researcher and you hit the pages hosting the malware too much... there is an automated process that automatically launches a denial of service [attack] against you,&quot; he said. This attack, which floods the victim&#39;s computer with a deluge of Internet traffic, knocked part of the UC San Diego network offline when it first struck.Lately Storm has been responsible for a large quantity of &quot;pump and dump&quot; spam, which tries to temporarily boost the price of penny stocks. But one area that does not seem to be of interest to Storm&#39;s creators is identity theft. &quot;Believe it or not, credit card numbers aren&#39;t worth that much money,&quot; Enright said. &quot;It&#39;s much better to make money... via pump and dump.&quot;&#160;
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Computers running Microsoft Windows XP can be infected by a new Trojan horse, program remotely controlled in a victim&#39;s system, even after it is patched with Microsoft&#39;s
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Apparently, some two thirds of home users think they are safe from online threats, but 20 percent of home computers are infected by a virus, and 80 percent have problems with spyware and adware.
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Some US computer users vastly under-estimate the dangers of going online, a survey shows.
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Millions of computer users are at risk of attack because flaws in the way Windows handles some images.