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. ...