Archive for the 'Viruses' Category

Inside a global cybercrime ring

A March 24, 2010 Reuters story headlined “Inside a global cybercrime ring” by reporter Jim Finkle leads with this paragraph: Hundreds of computer geeks, most of them students putting themselves through college, crammed into three floors of an office building in an industrial section of Ukraine’s capital Kiev, churning out code at a frenzied pace. [...]

Facebook virus leads to gold for hackers

News of a new virus, called “Facebook Fan Check Virus”, is sending a lot of people to Google to search for information, and those searches are leading them right into hacker traps. Click on one of those websites and the most likely result is that you’ll download scareware, an urgent notice that your PC has [...]

New malware trick

Warren Franklin, a fellow cyber crime fighter, writes this morning, … you shouldn’t be too surprised to learn that there is a new malware trick.  It’s called “quality assurance.”  Malware distributors are outsourcing for quality assurance going to sites like virtest.com. According to Cisco, for a fee the site tests malicious files against the latest [...]

Fake Software: Cybercrime product of the year

In its midyear report on cyber security, Cisco Systems names rogue anti-virus software the cybercrime product of the year. There is a lot of great software that you can get for little or nothing from the freeware and shareware communities. There is also a lot of very dangerous free software being pushed by cyber criminals. [...]

Botnetweb

A new digital age vocabulary word has just been coined: “botnetweb.“ You know what a botnet is: a collection of hijacked PCs under the control of a hacker (botmaster). Link a bunch of botnets together and you get a botnetweb, a compilation of millions of PCs. In a PC World article published yesterday, Ed Larkin [...]

Graham Cluley

I’d like to introduce Graham Cluley, one of the world’s leading experts in viruses and spam, and Senior Technology Consultant at Sophos Labs. Sophos is a leader in security technology, whose customer list includes many of the world’s largest corporations, financial institutions, universities, and government agencies. Cluley recently started a wonderful blog on security, written [...]

Michael Fiora’s Nightmare

First he was fired. Then he was arrested. When Michael Fiola’s laptop computer was stolen back in November 2006, his employer, the Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents, gave him a replacement. It was a ticking time bomb. A few months later, officials noted that his usage account was 4 times normal. On investigating, they found [...]