TechBlog

False images from Cosmopolitan infect computers with fake antivirus product BitDefender today warned of a new threat following the flood of interest in the result of the January 19th Massachusetts elections. The day after his winning Senate campaign, nude pictures of Cosmopolitan’s Sexiest Man of 1982 Scott Brown not only stirred women’s imaginations, but also got the interest of malware creators. The latter exploited the news to spread a fake antivirus: Trojan.FakeAV.XP. Instead of spicy pictures, the targeted user received messages of false infections on their computer and prompts to buy a fake antivirus product. ...

Some questionable sites associated with the Winigard family of rogue security products pulls it from this location, which appears to belong to a graphic designer in Canada. It’s funny and here’s waaaay too much truth there:

Symantec Security Response has repeatedly warned that looking for free movies and videos online often results in malware infection, and here we go again with yet another example. We recently became aware of a campaign, centered around the YouTube Web site, to trick users into following malicious links. YouTube is one of the most popular video sharing sites and therefore is often picked by online criminals hoping for an easy catch. Performing a search using a (generally female) celebrity’s name followed by “sex tape” or a recent movie name yields results such as the following: ...

This week we’ve seen a spam campaign aimed at separating unsuspecting users from their iPhone details. Messages have the subject “IMPORTANT: Your iPhone Warranty Extension for 1 Year!”, pretend to be sent from “[email protected]”, and look as follows (click to enlarge the image): Recipients who feel like they can’t let this limited-time too-good-to-be-true special offer pass them by will find themselves redirected to the following page: ...

But don’t. Please don’t!… just…. don’t!… Instead, why don’t you apply the out-of-band patch ( MS10-002 ) that Microsoft has just released…?!!! Patching remote-code-execution vulnerabilities is usually “a good idea” to say the least. But, considering that: Microsoft rushed to get this patch out…… ( Thank you Microsoft! ) And that, this patch addresses several Internet Explorer vulnerabilities – of which includes CVE-2010-0249 – the infamous “Aurora attacks” related vulnerability that’s well known to be making the rounds in the wild. ...

I dislike salesmen. The look on their faces irks me when I can feel the dollars flicking in their eyes. I hate it when my car insurance company ask if i want to get home insurance as well. I do not like it when my credit card company tries to sell me a great new insurance product. In general, I hate to be a victim of cross selling. Malware authors are just like salesmen. They cross-sell as well. A fake AV tried to do the same to me. Besides offering great AV protection, it wants me to get some useful codecs so that I can watch all my legit DVDrips. Thus, someone decided that in order to get me to install their codecs, he/she will have to terminate all processes related to media players. ...

APcSecure is a new rogue from the WiniGuard clone factory.

The Danwei web site (Chinese media, advertising, and urban life) is carrying a rippingly funny blog piece by Alice Xin Liu about a recent Chinese government program that would have China Mobile monitor mobile telephone text transmissions for conversations of a sexual nature. Offenders’ (messaging) service would be cut off until they wrote a “self-criticism.” Xin Lilu said bloggers in China are having a ball with the idea that the government is trying to censor dirty jokes, which apparently are a significant part of the culture of Chinese people (as if they were any different than the rest of us). ...

Virgin Media, the UK telecommunications giant that supplies TV, phone and Internet services, has begun to use deep packet inspection determine if its Internet customers are sharing music or films. The monitoring system will check transmitted data against a database of copyrighted music and video to spot illegal file sharing. Virgin Media said the system isn’t keeping track of IP addresses of the transmissions and the technology isn’t designed to catch illegal downloaders, but it could. ...

The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has released a report that says 95 percent of all email is now spam. The report was based on surveying last year of email traffic by about 100 service providers in 30 countries. ENISA Executive Director Dr. Udo Helmbrecht said: “Spam remains an unnecessary, time consuming and costly burden for Europe. Given the number of spam messages observed, I can only conclude more dedicated efforts must be undertaken. _ _ “Email providers should be better at monitoring spam and identifying the source. Policy-makers and regulatory authorities should clarify the conflicts between spam-filtering, privacy, and obligation to deliver.” ...