Malware fuorilegge in California
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30/09/04 - News - San Francisco (USA) - La lotta agli spyware, infidi programmini che si infilano surrettiziamente nei PC meno protetti, prende un nuovo abbrivio in California, dove il governatore Arnold Schwarzenegger ha firmato la legge che li mette al
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An unpatched flaw in antivirus software compromises student data in Colorado.
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Hacker gets three years for adware assault A California man has been jailed for three years and one month over a botnet attack that floored tens of thousands of computers including systems at a Seattle hospital, a California school district, and US Department of Defence machines.â¦
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After a two-year investigation, U.S. law enforcement officials have disrupted one of the largest software piracy operations in the United States with the arrest of 11 suspects in California, Washington and Texas. In the raid, FBI agents seized pirated applications valued as high as US&#36;87 million, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California.
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Program isn't entirely benevolent: it also downloads files to infected PCs.
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A newly identified malicious program not only messes up its victims' computers, it taunts them too.
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Time to call the credit bureaus? Almost 1.4 million records containing the personal information of Californians likely stolen.
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Worried about catching viruses, spyware, or other malicious software while surfing the Web?
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During a weeklong period in mid-November, security experts with Symantec observed roughly 65,000 new applications being downloaded onto the computers of customers participating in a new research project -- based on their analysis of the software, as many as 60 percent of the programs were malicious.The involved timeframe represented a relative high point for the percentage of unknown applications being downloaded by Symantec's project participants, and the basis for the company's assessment of the programs as malicious was predicated largely on the programs' use of obfuscated naming conventions.However, the numbers point to a disturbing trend that the researchers say may force the security company to change its fundamental approach for warding off threats -- that being that the number of malicious applications coming to life on the Web appears to be outpacing the volume of legitimate programs.With malware authors using fuzzing tools to find holes in popular applications such as Web browsers, and testing their work against commercial anti-virus (AV) products to ensure that the attacks evade detection by the tools, leading researchers at Symantec admit that defending against threats using traditional methods has become something of a losing battle."The reality is that most new malware is going undetected by commercial security products, and not just Symantec's, but we have to recognize that like all other AV products we are probably missing a sizeable amount of this malware," said Carey Nachenberg, a member of the company's Security Response team who also wears the title of Symantec Fellow."Eventually we write [virus] signatures and get those out to customers, but it appears that a sizeable proportion of this malware never gets detected," he said. "Instead of distributing one copy of each malware program to thousands of people, they're producing a copy for as few as two or three people and then re-writing it; so, if we get one version we can remove it from a few computers, but not all the variants. The problem with this is that there is the potential over time for almost everyone to have some form of infestation, maybe in only a few years time."The trend toward malware authors using small runs of attacks to evade detection and hook as many victims as possible, known as server-side polymorphism, is forcing Symantec to reassess how it goes about protecting its users.Since it can't hope to keep up with every flavor of threat that is being created, traditional countermeasures such as the use of malware signatures or behavioral heuristics will need to be augmented with new tactics, Nachenberg said.One such alternative is the use of the same distributed data collection capabilities that Symantec is using to track the proliferation of malware. By creating a system of file and Web site reputation by studying applications usage patterns among its customers, the researcher said, Symantec hopes to use a community approach to help people determine which programs they decide to use, or avoid.Much as many people turn to the reviews section on Amazon.com or the buyer feedback system on eBay to get a real-world take on products before they decide to buy, Nachenberg contends that by watching how people are using various applications the security vendor can use a process of elimination for weeding out malware from legitimate software.If only a few people among the millions of Symantec customers who could contribute usage data to such a program were utilizing some application in question, it would be prudent to recommend that people avoid the program until its nature has been better determined, he said.Using opt-out tools that provide anonymous feedback on applications that were built into Symantec's existing Norton AntiVirus and Internet Security 2008 products, the company is already gathering the type of data necessary to create such a system of recommendation."Right now this is just a long-term research project, but we hope that as we get more users involved in the system, we can truly get a better idea of what is on people's computers so that we can identify malicious software based on the demographics of who is using it, versus what it does," Nachenberg said. "We're hoping to get more clarity through the large base of users we have; by collecting this data we should be able to get the most comprehensive view of the usage patterns to derive reputation information for everything they use."Faced with questions over potential privacy issues driven by Symantec's ability to watch just who is using what applications and how, the researcher reiterated that users must be made aware of the data collection, allowed to opt-out, and guaranteed that all the information aggregation is done in an anonymous fashion.By offering users the ability to decide whether or not to use an application based on demographics, versus simply blocking programs based on its own observations, the company will also give people more freedom to determine what tools they feel are appropriate to use, he said."If we know that only five people are using a program, given the tens of millions of users we ultimately hope to have in the system, we can be totally objective and recommend that people wait until it is scrutinized further before using it," the researcher said. "We will need to have some manual process for white-listing programs as well, but we think that using this approach we can deliver a reasonable amount of quality with a low false positive rate."If the volume of new malware strains arriving on the Web continues to outpace the proliferation of legitimate programs, Nachenberg said that AV vendors including Symantec may need to move to a white-listing approach in general, and focus more attention on identifying good applications instead of trying to chase down all the bad."If there is less software to analyze that is good, it makes more sense to spend our time scanning for good programs and simply telling our users to avoid everything else," he said. "We're considering models where we can produce the world's largest up-to-date white list of software, but it's not something we can put together in a year; maybe in two-to-three years time."
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A software developer whose program was accidentally labeled a threat is considering action against the antivirus company.
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The Web site for Indian antivirus vendor AvSoft Technologies has been hacked and is being used to install malicious software on visitors&#39; computers, security researchers said Thursday.The download section of AvSoft&#39;s S-cop Web site hosts the malicious code, according to Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor AVG. &quot;They let one of their pages get hit by an iFrame injection,&quot; he said. &quot;It shows that anyone can be a victim.... It&#39;s hard to protect Web servers properly.&quot;The technique used on the site has been seen in thousands of similar hacks over the past few months. The attackers open an invisible iFrame Window within the victim&#39;s browser, which redirects the client to another server. That server, in turn, launches attack code that attempts to install malicious software on the victim&#39;s computer.The malicious software is a variant of the Virut virus family.The iFrame pages are commonly used by Web developers to insert content into their Web pages, but because it is possible to create an invisible iFrame window, the technology is often misused by hackers as a way to silently redirect victims to malicious Web sites.AvSoft, based in New Delhi, sells an antivirus product called SmartCOP and has sold a second antivirus product called Smartdog. The company, which is not well-known in the U.S., also specializes in recovering data lost due to virus attacks. The company could not be reached for comment Thursday afternoon.That data recovery service could come in handy for some, as Virut is known as a &quot;parasitic infector&quot; virus that is extremely difficult to remove. &quot;It infects all of your programs on your local hard drives, and then it starts hitting your network drives as well the first time you run,&quot; Thompson said.Fortunately, the malware used to install Virut exploits only well-known bugs, meaning that users who are running antivirus software on fully patched systems will probably not be infected by the attack in its current state, security experts say.Nobody knows how the malware got onto the Web site in the first place. News of the hack was reported on the Full Disclosure security discussion list on Thursday.McAfee Security Research Manager Dave Marcus believes that the site was compromised by exploiting a Web programming error, most likely in the site&#39;s SQL or PHP code. Security experts say that criminals have written automated programs that scour the Web for these types of flaws and then automatically infect sites, making this an increasingly common problem.
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We've feared it for a long time, and now the situation has come to pass: The malware's moving faster than the tools to thwart it. But since you can't simply hide under a non-wired rock and hope it goes away, it's worth knowing how AV manufacturers are battling back -- and how you can too.
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No smoke without liars The California wildfire disaster, like so many other tragedies involving loss of life, has become the subject of an online scam. If the history of incidents like the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster and Hurricane Katrina is anything to go by, fire-themed malware is likely to follow.â¦
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SAN FRANCISCO -    For ransom: your sensitive computer files. In the latest online scam, cybercrooks are breaking into the PCs of small businesses and individuals, locking up data and demanding money in return for freeing it.
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STOCKHOLM -- Malicious programs that can delete address books. Junk messages that flood a cellphone's inbox. Stealthy code that uses Bluetooth wireless technology to sneak onto handsets.
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Authorities are trying to determine how a hacker gained access to a University of California computer that contained personal information for up to 600,000 state residents.
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Blog: Phishing and drive-by downloads are possible if you stumble across an infected profile.