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This section covers security and privacy related topics, along with a comprehensive collection of articles ranging from the latest security vulnerabilities, spyware detection, spyware removal, spyware alerts to online fraud, phishing scams, and spyware legislation. Feel free to share your ideas and concerns with our research team and other Internet users by leaving a comment on any post. Take advantage of the tutorials, advice, and other helpful anti-spyware information.
Many websites that secretly download malicious software onto computers on the internet are increasing at an alarming rate. About 18 percent of security breaches online are from malicious software and hackers. Attacks made by malicious software and hackers have increased 300 percent in the number and proportion of Trojan downloaders according to a report by Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center.
A discovery that we made when we were infected with the MalwareBell or Malware Bell rogue anti-spyware program was that Malware Bell classified PCTools as malware. As shown in the image below, Malware Bell classified PCTools as being a variant of the Trojan.Win32.SystemCrash infection. Not only did Malware Bell insinuate that it was an actual Trojan infection but it has the word “adware” in parenthesis next to the Trojan name.
Today’s April Fool’s holiday gives spammers a chance to use the day to their advantage. Spammers have used the obvious keyword in the subject line of their spam messages to read “April Fool’s Day” drawing attention to internet users all over the world. The likelihood of a computer user opening an email titled “April Fool’s Day” on today’s date, which is April Fool’s day, is very common. The spammers know this and have jumped on the bandwagon of spamming people all over the internet.
Trend Micro, a security company, has already identified the spam messages as having an April Fool’s image which was taken from a simple Google image search using the keyword “April Fool’s Day”. The image is not original in the since that the spammer did not created it.
With the latest release of The Safari Web Browser version 3.1 many bugs have been fixed making it a safer web browser with less vulnerabilities. Apple recently released a major security update to the MAC OS operating system which included the Update to Safari 3.1.
Included with the Safari 3.1 package is a better execution of functions to keep Safari safe for internet surfers. An issue that a previous windows version of Safari had was the validation of certificates for websites. This gave hackers the ability to direct users to a legitimate site with a valid SSL certificate and then later redirect the user to a phishing website. Because Safari did not have a phishing filter this would happen without any road blocks causing potential identity theft.
A major security breach at the Hannaford East Coast supermarket chain in the New England area exposed over 4 million card numbers that led to 1,800 cases of fraud. This shocking news was announced Monday by the Hannaford Bros. grocery chain which abundant on the east coast of the United States.
Credit card numbers were stolen during the network breach which resulted in several fraud cases where the card numbers were used or had attempted use. The breach affected all 165 Hannaford stores in the northeast US, 106 Sweetbay stores in Florida and a small number of independent stores that sell Hannaford products.
MonaRonaDona sounds like some type of painting such as the Mona Lisa but is far from being a masterpiece when you computer has downloaded MonaRonaDona. MonaRonaDona has recently stirred up an uproar on the internet during the past couple of weeks after it was discovered as TROJ_MONAGRAY.A, which is a trojan infection.
MonaRonaDona is one of the latest dirty parasites to hit the internet causing havoc on user’s computers. Certain unconfirmed reports online have stated that MonaRonaDona may come from a possible malicious program called Registry Clean Fix. MonaRonaDona may also be a creation from another program called Unigray which is supposed to be a virus detection and removal tool. It was discovered that Unigray is not a legitimate virus tool but part of a Trojan infection. Both of the mentioned programs are all part of painting the full MonaRonaDona picture which is a ploy to infect your computer.
The hackers that created the Vundo infection are using a 404 toolkit method to load malware onto computers on the internet. The infection of a Trojan was recently discovered through a spam email message resulting in the installation of other malware as reported by Trend Micro. The spam message includes an image once the image is clicked on it will redirect you to a malicious website that loads an executable file onto your system. The file was identified to root from the address hxxp://BLOCKED-carvalhal.pt/tits.exe which was detected as TROJ_SHEUR.HD. The link source for this file was recently shut down.
Information about Pentagon breach that happened last summer due to a Windows vulnerability was recently discussed in some technological reports online. Back during the summer of 2007 the Pentagon had a hack that led to theft of sensitive information from the defense epicenter. With this type of attack from something as simple as an exploited windows vulnerability supports the fact that anyone is vulnerable and action must be taken regularly to prevent these instances.
Recently security researchers have discovered a “link hack” that may bypass the attempts of MySpace.com to filter and control links on its pages. With this link hacking it is possible that links on MySpace.com pages will redirect visitors to phishing websites. When a visitor lands on a phishing site their personal information can be compromised if they fall victim to the phishing ploy.
What is so dangerous about the discovered “link hack” is the links are displayed as legitimate MySpace.com links that are trusted by visitors and users of MySpace. Websense, a security researching company, recently said the link hack technique allows attackers to create malicious anchor tags over the majority of a given MySpace.com page. Many social sites such as MySpace.com allow their users to change the look and layout of personalized pages. With the “link hack” method in the wrong hands it could potentially redirect a large number of visitors to certain MySpace.com or phishing pages that a hacker chooses to setup.
The disruption of YouTube services Sunday brings serious questions to the table as to how vulnerable internet services are. According to network experts, the flaw uncovered due to YouTube’s outage may lead to a serious security problem.
In techie terms, the issue is underlying in the way Internet Service Providers (ISPs) share routing information called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). This is a standard protocol used by routers so that computers on the internet can be found. The ISPs share this information with one another and when one ISP has the bad batch of information it is shared with the rest of the internet.
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updated on 05/10/2008. |
Microsoft Discovers Increase in Trojan DownloadersMalware Bell Falsely Classifies PCTools as MalwareApril Fool’s Day Prompts Malicious Spam MessagesBeefed-Up Security In Safari 3.1 Web BrowserHackers Breach Hannaford Supermarket Chain, Exposes 4.2 million Card NumbersSafeshortcuts.comRegistryGreatInstantSafePage.comAntivirus 2008Mkrndofl ToolbarPCSweeperProAntiSpywareMasterManageddns404.comMalware BellSgoblxtm Toolbar
