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Hollywood celebrity Corey Haim has died in typical tabloid fashion: “under investigation.” And we all know that celebrity death equals Internet scams by the boatload. There are a number of spam runs currently circulating on video sharing sites such as Youtube, ready to catch out the curious and the unwary. Shall we take a look? “Suicide or killed! Watch Corey Haim first found dead” Classy. Visiting mycelebzone(dot)com will pop open a Hotbar prompt, which you need to install to “see the content”: ...

This is an article taken from CNN and I don’t agree or disagree it. What security concerns are hidden in the murk of cloud computing? (CNN) — Stormy weather could be on the horizon for cloud computing as security experts warn not enough is being done to make sure one of the hottest IT trends is safe. “There are many motivations for why an individual or a company would want to engage in cloud computing,” said Thomas Parenty, managing director of Parenty Consulting, a Hong Kong-based information security consulting firm. “None of them have to do with enhanced security.” ...

Malware has traditionally been easy to spot and classify, mainly because it was created to serve a specific nefarious purpose and nothing else. In the ongoing arms race between malware authors and the security industry, stealth and other ‘in plain sight‘ technologies are emerging as clear favorites. Case in point is a recent Craigslist phish, disguised as a phone update – nothing new about malware pretending to be something it isn’t, but that’s not where the story ends. Examining the executable shows that it is nothing more than a RAR self-extracting (SFX) archive – and thus not inherently malicious. ...

We’ve long believed that personalization makes search more relevant and fun. For nearly five years, Google has been tailoring results with personalized search. They’re announcing a new feature in search that makes it easier for you to mark and rediscover your favorite web content — stars. With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant. That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl]. Here’s what the new “Starred results” feature looks like: ...

Opera and Safari don’t currently allow browser extensions in the same way as Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome does, and therefore, providing WOT for these environments is not feasible. However, as a response to requests from our users, we have created a WOT bookmarklet that brings at least some of the functionality to the users of these two popular browsers. If you are using Safari or Opera, you can add the WOT bookmarklet to your browser simply by dragging this link to your bookmarks: WOT Rating. ...

Hello and welcome to this month’s blog on the Microsoft patch releases. This is a fairly quiet month—the vendor is releasing two bulletins covering a total of eight vulnerabilities. All of the issues are rated “Important” this month: seven affecting Office/Excel and one affecting Movie Maker and Producer. All of the issues are file-based remote code-execution vulnerabilities in the context of the currently logged-in user. Microsoft also released a security advisory (981374) today regarding a publicly disclosed vulnerability affecting Internet Explorer 6 and 7. Limited, targeted attacks exploiting this issue have been detected in the wild. ...

Here is yet another example of a company distributing malware to its userbase. Unfortunately it probably won’t be the last. Today one of our colleagues received a brand new Vodafone HTC Magic with Google’s Android OS. “Neat” she said. Vodafone distributes this phone to its userbase in some European countries and it seems affordable as you can get it for 0€ or 1€ under certain conditions. The interesting thing is that when she plugged the phone to her PC via USB her Antivirus went off, detecting both an autorun.inf and autorun.exe as malicious. A quick look into the phone quickly revealed it was infected and spreading the infection to any and all PCs that the phone would be plugged into. ...

Hmmm. A new vector for malware: USB battery chargers. Wonderful. The U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) is warning that Energizer DUO USB battery chargers have been found infected with a Trojan that loads backdoor malware on a victim PC along with its battery monitoring software. The charger copies a .dll file named UsbCharger.dll in the application’s directory and another named Arucer.dll in the Windows system32 directory. USBCharger sets a registry entry to autoexecute Arucer.dll when Windows starts. ...

A Windows Update is available to users who are located in member countries of the European Union allowing for choosing a different standard browser for the system. The update is available for download through Windows Update. The Update creates a shortcut on your desktop. This shortcut leads to a Web page in which it is possible to select which Web browser to install. Additionally, the first time the users logs in to the computer after installing the update, Windows Internet Explorer starts automatically and displays the Browser Choice Web page. ...

There’s an angelically tinged infection doing the rounds at the moment that has more than a whiff of sulphur about it. We can’t say for definite, but it looks like the point of this little angel is to turn your PC into a file storage area for an IRC channel since it dumps you into #music IRC channels and makes sure you can accept various media files. Our tale begins with an Email, claiming you have a “funny picture from Facebook friends” waiting for you at Oast(dot)com: ...

Cybercriminals are attacking bloggers who use Google’s Blogger.com. We have received emails intended for bloggers to update their account. Here’s the snapshot email of the email we have received: The email contains link that will redirect to fake login page of the “Blogger.com”. As seen from the highlighted link, it has a root domain “*.erdca.kr” which is differ from the authentic root domain of blogger.com. The fake login page which is known as phishing site appears to be like this: ...

Google is set to launch an app store for business next week, Mashable has learned from sources close to the company. It will be focused around creating software for Google Apps and could launch as soon as Tuesday. Early last month, news leaked about Google working on its own app store that would give third-party apps and developers the opportunity to sell their software to customers of Google Apps. This included options for increasing security, word-processing and information porting/syncing. ...

Sources on a number of forums tell me that a certain application is going to be released into the wild in a few days, promoted heavily via sites such as Youtube to attract as many potential victims as possible. I thought it might be beneficial to get a head start on the bad guys and get word out before they hit their big green “Go” switch. What is it? I believe the following screenshot can answer that question: ...

We frequently read stories about spammers who can circumvent CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) authentication. Using bot-infected machines, they can create a vast number of random e-mail accounts for spamming purposes. This week, a federal judge in Newark, New Jersey, revealed the latest use of a botnet-like network with a CAPTCHA breaker. In this case, the computers overseen by the defendants were used to buy seats for high-profile concerts and sports events from ticket sellers’ websites. The defendents later allegedly resold the tickets on Internet at much higher prices. ...

My friends often ask me about steps they can take to keep their systems at work and home free from malware. Apart from the usual recommendation to use alternative, less targeted and therefore slightly more secure operating system like Linux or OSX (OpenBSD would also be an interesting alternative) I used to mention that a change of the web browser would also be very helpful. Internet Explorer is still the most commonly used browser with a little above 60% market share, but its market share is steadily in decline in the last couple of years. I am fairly sure that one of the main reasons people move to Firefox or Chrome is perceived lack of security. Internet Explorer is the most common target for malware and various exploit packs although the latest versions have proved to be much more resilient to various attacks. With most of the users finally making the switch away from IE6 we hope that the exploits will be even less successful in the future. This of course means that attackers are changing their focus to other products like Adobe Reader of Flash, the most commonly used internet applications after browsers. Exploiting Flash or Adobe Reader allows the attacker to abstract the browser version and often the browser itself. Adobe’s attitude to security also does not help. ...