Be on guard against email messages that look like a meeting announcement. The attachment, Report.zip, is a Trojan horse. In many cases there are what appear to be intentional typos in the body text, partly to defeat spam filters and partly to appear as a hastily written email. You will want to treat these kinds of email with suspicion. When in doubt, suspicious attachment and links can be sent to Virus Total for analysis. Thanks again to Continue Reading →
LinkedIn has made some significant changes to the home page, and is attempting to show only updates that you would be most interested in. Taking a quick look myself, I can’t say that the changes are leaping out at me, but then it might be hard to notice what is NOT there. LinkedIn announced this on their blog on July 16th. Please feel free to leave a comment about what you think of the changes.
When I teach my computer security classes, I am often asked “why do they do it?” My answer is always “It’s the money.” Most of the computer and network malware exploits are making money for the perpetrators one way or another, and as more traditional criminal organizations move into cybercrime, we see more traditional criminal elements. In this case, spam email messages are sent out with a subject line of “You pig!” and a threatening note that the attached photograph ...
Continue Reading →According to security vendor McAfee, in their May threat report, active malware at large on the Internet has reached a new four-year high, on track to reach 100 million samples by the end of 2012. This was reported in the August 2012 issue of PCWorld. New development kits for malware writers appeared that are responsible for the increase in activity. The successful counterattacks on the botnets built on the Zeus and SpyEye packages has forced cybercriminals to seek out different ...
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Yahoo Voices, which is a sharing site on Yahoo “where your expertise and perspectives take center stage!” and users can post their own articles, videos and slideshows was hacked recently by the “D33Ds Company” and they posted 453,491 email addresses and passwords online. If you have an account on this website, you will want to change the password. And try going with something harder than “123456, password, welcome, ninja, or abc123” which were the top 5 most used ...
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A cybercriminal going by the name “Dr. Smurf was taken down by the FBI for selling stolen credit card information on the underground “Dark Market” in 2008. What Dr. Smurf didn’t know id that the FBI had infiltrated the DarkMarket in 2006 and was using it to learn how the world of cybercrime really worked, and to find and apprehend the malefactors that buy and sell credit card information, malware, and ...
Continue Reading →The unconstitutional and oxymoronic Department of Homeland Security made a $1000 bet with researchers at the University of Texas at Austin that the security for flying drones was “unhackable” – and lost! Full article on Sophos. They took control of the drone with a homemade spoofer that cost $100 to build. Fortunately, this puts a crimp in the plans of DHS to fly drones over American soil, since this technology would allow a drone to be turned into ...
Continue Reading →There are basically two ways to read and store your emails, and the way you choose will tend to lock you into a method over a long stretch of time. The main difference between web mail and software clients is where the mail is read and stored. Web mail is read using a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Chrome. Software or “client-based” email is read using an email reading program such as Windows Live Mail, Microsoft Outlook, or ...
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Have you ever reported content on Facebook as “abusive?” Have you ever wondered just what happens. Facebook has opened the door a bit to let users see inside, in a report they issued on June 19th.
Basically, there are four abuse teams working different issues. The Safety Team focuses on violent and harmful behavior by it’s members. The Hate and Harassment Team specialize in dealing with abusive speech. The ...
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This story is interesting because it shows just how powerful a Trojan Horse program can be. Trojans make up over two-thirds of all malware infections, and the reason is that Trojan Horse programs are small, easy to conceal in another program like a game, or easy to install using a drive-by download from a compromised web site. These programs allow the attacker to remotely access and control the computer at a later date, and install other malware applications such as ...
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