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Security researchers examining the directories of the URLs of some of the latest Koobface runs may stumble upon a Christmas greeting:

For those of you that are having to put up with looking after your parents over Christmas: Would you much rather selfishly indulge yourselves with partying? A kindly spammer has a very seasonal Christmas Eve message offering to make this the last year that you will have to “put up” with the burdens of family elders. But be careful that your own children don’t read this. Free Help Finding Senior Care for Mom or Dad ...

APCProtect is a phony security program, designed to rip people off. APCProtect uses scare tactics including false security warnings and system scan results that are false to frighten people into purchasing it. If APCProtect is installed on your computer, you should remove it immediately. if your computer is infected with this malware, you must remove it soon, Click Here to learn how to remove it.

Once again, we’d like to wish our readers Merry Christmas with a reference to the 1986 CHRISTMA EXEC worm Here’s a link to January 1987 Risks Digest, discussing the worm. And here’s a link to the original source code for this worm. Normally we wouldn’t link to malware code, but hey, it’s 23 years old.

AV-Comparatives Summary Reports 2009 Available! Summary Report 2009 AV-Comparatives Site: http://www.av-comparatives.org/ Read/Download Summary Here. Overall winners of 2009 (Best Products of the Year by AV-Comparatives): To be rated “Best Anti-Virus Product of 2009” by AV-Comparatives, an Anti-Virus product should preferably have very high detection rates (of malware and also potentially unwanted applications), high proactive on-demand detection (or provide proactive protection), very few false positives (FP), scan fast and reliably with a low system impact, provide good malware removal capabilities, protect the system against malware/websites with malicious software without relying too much on user decisions/interactions, cause no crashes or hangs, and have no annoying bugs. Based on the awards given by AV-Comparatives during 2009, several products got many high awards and are very close, so that we decided to award not only the Best Product of 2009 but also the second and third places (Silver and Bronze). Looking into the detail of the raw results, we decided to give the following awards: ...

It’s the usual situation, with the bad guys exploiting the death of a famous person, just like they did with Michael Jackson. Yesterday we identified some Twitter accounts that are being used both to send “make money on the Internet” spam, and also to spread links to malware. In both cases, they used Brittany Murphy’s name. Here’s a couple of examples: The actual text of messages of this type can vary. What characterizes them is that the first link is genuine, i.e. it leads to a site which really does talk about the topic tweeted. The second link though, leads to standard spam advertising sites which tell you how to earn money on the Internet, offer various goods, etc. The second type of tweet we’re seeing is undeniably malicious. These tweets, like the first type, use Brittany Murphy’s name, but have a shortened bit.ly URL leading to malware: ...

Performance comparative test result is available! AV-Comparatives: http://www.av-comparatives.org/ Read/Download test result from Here.

This is the ‘12 scams of Christmas’ I mentioned in last post: Pipers tout fake gold rings as Maids are ‘a-phishing’ to milk bank accounts On what is traditionally the busiest online shopping day of the year (1), consumers are being warned not to become victims of the ‘12 Scams of Christmas’ and to take extra care with personal and IT security. The ‘12 Scams of Christmas’ developed by the National Fraud Authority (NFA), The UK Cards Association and the City of London Police (CoLP) highlight the greatest holiday fraud threats and how to spot them. ...

Tanya has just posted over on Kaspersky Russian site about losses caused by Internet fraudsters in England and Wales. If you want to practice your Russian, hop over there, and take a look! I know that most people in the UK prefer to get their news in English. So here’s a few facts and figures: In a recent statement, the Office of Fair Trading estimated that losses caused by Internet fraud amounted to £14 billion per year. That’s a lot of money! It’s also a lot of victims! ...

Crime traditionally increases during the holiday season, and cybercrime is no different. The malware writers, spammers and scammers are out in force. They’ve recently hit “Odnoklassniki” with this message: “Hi! I’ve got a New year surprise for you [emoticon] send 2133 279 (must be with a space) to 4460 and you’ll be pleasantly surprised! If you don’t take a look, I’ll be very grouchy with you [emoticon]” This message is clearly designed to make the bad guys a bit of holiday cash: an SMS sent to the number given in the message costs between $5 and $12 dollars, depending on the mobile service provider. ...

After months of negotiations, US President Barack Obama has finally chosen a Chief of CyberSecurity – Mr Howard A Schmidt. Confirmation of the appointment is expected shortly. Mr Schmidt, who previously served with the Bush administration as a cyber security official, comes to the job with an impressively lengthy list of credentials. The new Chief will essentially be the administration’s go-to man for any coordinated efforts to deal with cyber threats and will be reporting to the National Security Council. ...

I was just looking at Facebook to check for spam and scams when I found this: I’ve blurred out a few things for privacy, and, most crucially, safety. The point of this post is the domain name. The spaces around the dot and the zero in “C0M” are just as they were in the original spam message. If spammers are going to the trouble to obfuscate their messages, it seems to show that Facebook’s spam filters are having some effect. Malformed links mean that you have to make an serious effort to actually go and visit the spammer site. And consequently, if someone’s going to go through all that trouble, they’re more likely to buy into whatever scam is at the other end. Click on the link, and you immediately get redirected, even though you won’t notice: ...

I ran into a few strange IMs over the weekend. When I was not shoveling out my driveway from the 15 inches of snow that covered it I was logged into Facebook telling people about it…. It was then that I started receiving some VERY interesting IMs from a friend extolling the virtues of a clean colon (yep – you read that right): This lead to the following questionable site, which had some very interesting comments on McAfee SiteAdvisor site: ...

Just a quick note – the sudden death of Hollywood celebrity Brittany Murphy last Sunday (BBC report here) has prompted a spike in searches on the subject – and of course, an SEO attack. Users who click on a poisoned search result link will be redirected to a website that will display a scare message trying to panic users into downloading rogue AV software: Screenshots of the rogue AV: ...

Well, it didn’t take long for the Christmas E-Card scams to start. Recently we have seen email messages pretending to be from Hallmark, suggesting that you have received an E-card from a friend. The complete email message looks like this:You have recieved a Hallmark E-Card from your friend. To see it, check the link below: http://www.hallmark.com/webapp/wcs/stores/Occasion/ChristmasE-CardsThere’s something special about that E-Card feeling. We invite you to make a friend’s day and send one.Hope to see you soon, Your friends at Hallmark ...