Tag: MALWARE

Security company BitDefender -- which recently released the Safego app to protect your Facebook account -- has put together an infographic illustrating information about the state of scams on the social networking site. At an impressive 7,532 pixels tall, the graphic offers plenty of insight into the dark underbelly of Facebook. The company found profile insight apps -- like those which ...

Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, working with federal law enforcement agents, has brought down the world's largest spam network, Rustock. Rustock, at its peak, was a botnet of around 2 million spam-sending zombies capable of sending out 30 billion spam email per day. Microsoft's wholesale slaughter of Rustock could reduce worldwide spam output by up to 39%. Rustock was taken down, piece ...

Tragedies like the massive earthquake which recently hit Japan are bad enough, and they're compounded online by nefarious types who want to profit from the inevitable increase in search engine queries. It's a common way to trick users into installing malicious programs like fake antivirus or fake system maintenance tools. By getting in quickly on new search terms as the become popular, ...

No, despite what you may have heard on Facebook and Twitter, Charlie Sheen is not yet dead. With the eye-catching title of "RIP! Charlie Sheen found Dead at his House," a massive clickjacking hoax is doing the rounds on Facebook and Twitter. Clicking the link will take you to a fake YouTube page -- and if you click anywhere on the page, the hoax will infect your Facebook profile and begin ...

It's been widely reported that the world's millions of smartphones are the next juicy target for malware creators, and we're beginning to see the shift. Trojanized apps recently infiltrated the Android Market and now Trend Micro is reporting that a Zeus trojan variant has begun infecting BlackBerry devices. The trojan installs silently and then notifies its administrators that the compromised ...

You may not have heard of G Data, but the German security software developer consistently posts top marks in antivirus tests. Now, we know many of you don't like toolbars, but G Data CloudSecurity for Firefox and Internet Explorer is one that might be good enough to recommend to your friends and family who need help avoiding malware on the Web. CloudSecurity offers functionality much like ...

Thanks to a tip-off by a redditor, and some investigation by Android Police, Google has pulled 21 Android Market apps that were infected with a backdoor Trojan rootkit. If you downloaded any of the infected apps, they will be automatically deleted from your phone. The attack vector was ingenious, and plays on the Android Market's biggest weakness: the almost complete absence of app moderation. ...

In August of 2010, Intel announced it was purchasing McAfee for a cool $7.7 billion in cash. The deal had been held up by U.S. and EU regulators ever since, but the transaction has finally been given the all-clear. The two companies plan to develop security solutions which more tightly integrate hardware and software, a move both claim is imperative in today's rapidly evolving threat ...

Microsoft recently delivered a patch for its malware and antivirus tools, including Security Essentials, Windows Defender, MSRT, and Forefront -- its enterprise antivirus solution. The patch addresses a flaw in Microsoft's scanning engine which could allow an attacker who had a valid username and password to gain elevated rights on a system. As is often the case with these flaws, the fact that ...

After only a few weeks in beta testing, Avast 6 is now ready for download. If you're looking for a good, free antivirus program for your Windows computer, Avast is still one of the best options -- and version 6 adds one very powerful defense mechanism. Sandboxing -- which allows your computer to run unknown and untrusted programs in an isolated spece where they can't harm your operating ...

It's hard for less-savvy computer users to stay out of trouble on the Internet, and part of the problem is that they just don't know how to identify potential threats. Fortunately, there are plenty of great online resources you can use, or point your friends and family to. We've already covered the excellent Facecrooks, which helps users avoid trouble on Facebook, and today we're taking a look at ...

One shortcoming of previous versions of Immunet Protect -- the upstart cloud antivirus recently added to the Google Pack -- was that it needed to be plugged into the cloud in order to provide meaningful protection. That's not a big minus since most of us are online 24-7, but with Immunet's acquisition by Sourcefire it became important to address the needs of network administrators. And ...

You may have noticed Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool in your list of available Windows Updates. Heck, you may even have seen it in your Add/Remove Programs and wondered where it came from. The MSRT can actually be quite useful, and it's a fast, simple way to remove a number of common malware infections. In an update pushed yesterday, Microsoft added Cycobot to the list of malware ...

It may have taken a long time for Avast to move from version 4 to 5, but that's not going to be the case with Avast 6. A beta version has been made available for download, and there are plenty of new features that will make Avast 6 a worthy antivirus program for Windows. Two technologies which were introduced in paid editions of Avast 5 -- the Web Script Shield and site blocking -- have been ...

Now, we don't need fancy graphs to tell us that malware is all over the place -- but it's certainly eye-opening to see just how bad the problem has gotten. Unique samples gathered by AV-Test Labs this year nearly doubled in 2010 -- to almost 20 million, up from 12 million in 2009. That's no doubt due to the ever-morphing horde of rogue applications, which now include bogus system tune-up software ...