Review

Today we are going to take a closer look at bots and botnets. On the black market, selling bots and botnets is quite profitable, which makes creating them a popular activity for criminals. It helps that bot sources and creation kits are available on the Internet, allowing even script kiddies to create their own botnets. Another reason bots get created is that some people who get bored in their daily lives tend to do things that in their opinion might earn them respect or admiration in front of their peers or in various Internet chat rooms. ...

The underlying structure of a typical website is made up of different folders and sub-folders, much like the ones that are on your computer. A webmaster (is this term still used often lol?) transfers files back and forth using an FTP client in order to update the website. In most cases, specific folders are created for a specific reason. For instance the ‘pub’ folder is usually a public repository that allows anybody access to. ...

The internet is rife with free tools from anything to everything (almost) – from free HTML web editors to free applications to free games and so on. We’ve been in this situation before. Sometimes out of curiosity or “affluenza” (also known as “I-GOTTA-HAVE-IT-NOW-NO-MATTER-WHAT”), we are tempted to install some of these free tools and applications from the web. The unfortunate problem with freebies is that unless you know the source of where you download the tools from and whether the software author who created the application is credible, you are literally at the whim and mercy of the author should you choose to download and install the application. ...

Or is it at the saturation point? The SANS Institute (acronym = SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security) web site carried a blog piece that gives a good snapshot of the horrible ongoing plague of spam email that IT folks all over the globe must deal with. The writer, Deborah Hale, said the ISP in the Midwest where she works received almost 20 million pieces of email for more than 9,000 accounts since the beginning of March. Only 713,222 (3.6 percent) were NOT spam. ...

We regularly learn of cases where criminals have gained access to credit card numbers via keyloggers, skimmers or online hacks. Once they have the credit card numbers, they basically have three ways to turn them into cash: Sell them Make fraudulent purchases on them Create real-world cards out of them To create real-world cards, you need blank cards to start with. These are known in the underground as “blank plastic“. ...

Are Mac OS X rogues an emerging threat? For many years discussions of the potential for malware on Macs have ended with the conclusion: “there isn’t much yet, but as soon as Mac gets a big market share the dark side is going to start writing the code.” There are indications that the bad guys are working on it. There have been some blog posts suggesting that the dark side is working hard to create a Mac OS X compatible rogue. SCMagazine is carrying a piece quoting a spokesman for researchers at Intego. Apparently Intego researchers got proof-of-concept code for an OS X rogue from underground sources and determined that it didn’t quite work. However, they concluded that some sophisticated coding was going on: ...

As we were working through URLs identified as suspicious due to our GTI technology, one of the URLs that presented itself was an average “.com” site that loaded a php. As we processed this – it was interesting to see that this php actually reached out to download a file that ended with the string facebook.com.exe — as this “.com” site was very social-network friendly – it would be easy to see how an average user, without web protection in place, would not even realize what was going on. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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: ...

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: ...

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. ...

We all know Brazilian hackers have mastered the art of creating banking trojans. The Chinese are very fond of password stealers targeting online games. The bad guys do have preferences for what type of malware they are creating based on their geolocation. Well, I found this exploit source code from a domain named kuwait{removed}.com The exploit downloads a file named unek.exe, very well known to be an IRC bot. ...