TechBlog

The massive growth of gold farming – the exchange of real money for virtual goods – might result in an increase in gaming Trojans and other malware aimed at gamers in the future. A well-respected researcher has described the incredible growth of “gold farming,” an significant industry and source of employment in China and other parts of Asia. He estimates there are 400,000 people, working for gold farming companies. They spend as much as 12 hours per day playing online games in order to accumulate virtual goods which can be sold to some of the 50 million on-line game players world wide for real cash. ...

The creators of WiniGuard rogue security software have released their first clone of 2010. This new rogue is called PcsProtector.

Mike Cardwell, an IT consultant in Nottingham, UK, reported on his blog finding a Y2010 bug in Spam Assassin. He found an error in a rule that Spam Assassin folks thought they fixed. “I think a lot of systems will be experiencing false positives on their ham because of this at the moment. It is a particularly high scoring rule considering that the default threshold is 5.0,” he wrote. For further information see: SpamAssassin Rule: FH_DATE_PAST_20XX

We see spam all the time. One of the most dependable things spammers do is to try and exploit various newsworthy events and holidays. Recently, we have seen spammers spreading malware using a combination of either or both flash updates andchristmas scams. Add one more to that list. Take for example, a spam I received today. The following email wishes the recipient a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and then displays the following screen in an attempt to entice the user to click on the message. ...

The one subset of malware which does not immediately seem motivated by financial incentives is the autorun worm. In fact the raison d’etre for this class of malware seems lodged in the annals of yesteryear; summarised in three words it could be “naive script-kiddy kudos”. Unlike the propagators of other classes of malware, ie professional criminals, the writers of autorun worms are amateurish upstarts. Ample evidence for this assertion may be found in a recent sample of Sohana, a family of autorun worms, which was cloaked in three layers of known virus infections: the ancient W32/Flcss over W32/Scribble-B over W32/Impair-A. ...

This is an interesting sample, caught by our honeypots. The file comes as a zip archive from qtpom{removed}.tripod.com/codec.zip, which once extracted looks like this: It is almost undetected. Virus Total report here. Truth be told, no blatant sign of malware activity is noticed at first until this: What the heck? This is not my Google home page. And what are those tabs up there: “Pharmacy”, “Casino”? The malware modifies the Windows hosts file to redirect popular sites to glike.net (IP: 92.241.164.9, Russian Federation). ...

Antivirus PC 2009 is the latest rogue security software to hit the internet. Antivirus PC 2009 is a complete scam designed to harass PC users into buying the corrupt software. Antivirus PC 2009 will try to trick people into thinking that their PC is infected with malware and recommends purchase or registering the software to remove the malware. Antivirus PC 2009 will show false scan results that report numerous infections. Antivirus PC 2009 will also display annoying popups and system alerts that stat the PC is infected, under attack or not protected with antivirus software and recommends buying Antivirus PC 2009. Antivirus PC 2009 will also prevent other programs from opening, even the web browser making it impossible to use the internet, rendering the PC nearly useless. ...

Cybercriminals love to use social engineering techniques to trick users into installing their malware. One of the latest fake-alert variants attempts to trick users into believing the software is related to or hosted by McAfee:mcafeevirusremover.com. The script hosted by the domain can attack the Windows browsers Internet Explorer, Mozilla Seamonkey, and Chrome. The script also affects browsers on Linux platforms. This fake-alert variant is hosted on at least 13 other known domains. McAfee’s Trusted Source blocks the IP addresses and the domains (including DNS and mail servers) associated with this Trojan. For example: ...

With a dazzling laser show, the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26c3) in Berlin, the last big security conference of 2009, has ended. If you haven’t been here, you might have missed fewer of the sessions than people on site, thanks to the worldwide availablility of live streams (and recordings). What you did miss was meeting all these people, though! 26c3 has simply outgrown the location it has occupied for the last few years, but this may be offset by a very successful experiment: allowing full remote access to the conference network via VPN for those who couldn’t attend. Other conferences should consider this (hey, Defcon team, are you reading this? 😉 ) as well, especially as air travel becomes less and less attractive. ...

From a site that is hacked and serving phishes: What’s mildly interesting is the types of phishes — “speciality phishes” that are not your typical banking/finance scam. These are phishes that are highly targeted, in this case at email systems of tiny Hamiltom College (not the first time I’ve seen this), the religious site cfaith.com, Saginaw Valley State University, and Villanova. cfaith: SVSU and Villanova ...