rogue software

Yesterday there was a volcanic eruption in Iceland, near the Eyjafjallajoekull glacier, that has led the Icelandic authorities to declare a state of emergency in southern Iceland. People living nearby have been evacuated in case of glacial melt water flooding and the airspace near the now active volcano is effectively closed off. As you have probably already guessed, any event which commands a high level of public interest will be pounced on quickly by the makers of fake antivirus software in order to make a quick buck....

With Windows 7 becoming increasingly popular, more and more software companies have begun to upgrade their interface for the latest Microsoft operating system. Manufacturers seem to understand the need for a beautiful user interface for their products. However, not all software behaves as good as it looks. Today, I saw a Fake Antivirus program with a newer, more jazzed up interface, which we detect as Troj/FakeAle-RK. This malware specifically targets users of Windows 7 and appears in the form of a pop-up dialogue box, which attempts to tell you that your Windows 7 PC has many serious threats....

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....

It’s time for your daily dose of “spot the fake program / avoid the fake program”. What is it this time? Well, if you have family members who are into webcams and chatting you might want to point them to this writeup because a new challenger has entered the ring: Yes, “Chat Cam” is a rather smart looking (and entirely fake) program designed to make end users think they’re taking part in a large community of webcam owners....

It’s been over a year since we first started seeing the familiar Windows XP My Computer page where it appears your drives are being scanned and it reports a bunch of non-existent malware on your computer. Yesterday I was investigating the latest hot news item where there was a FAMU (Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University) sex tape released on the internet and sure enough I found many SEO poisoned links claiming to have the video....

More than 60 websites have been found to be hotbeds for SEO poisoning. Each of these domains host hundreds of possible matches for search keys. Also, the topics in one domain overlap with that of the other domain, thus making it possible that they will both emerge in the search results. Topics range from the Winter Olympics Luge Crash to the death of Alexander McQueen and even to NASCAR Schedule....

VirusTotal has been well known to most readers of the blog. It’s a free virus and malware online scan service which allows submitters to test a particular file against a multitude of malware scanners. So, it’s not highly surprising that malware authors would try to use that name to further their gain. Today we came across such a sample arriving at one of our spamtraps through a car-related forum. The message looks like this:...

A massive earthquake struck near the Chilean city of Concepcion in the early hours of the morning of February 27th, 2010. The quake measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale was considerably stronger than the one that recently caused widespread destruction on the island of Haiti. Fortunately, despite the size of this latest quake, so far there has been few reported casualties. The quake occurred near the coast and tsumani warnings were issued for many countries bordering on the Pacific ocean....

People looking to take advantage of the savings from the government during these harder financial times are being hit with other financial burdens (Rogue AV software). Our (environmentally conscious) researcher Adam Thomas heard about a “green” hot water heater that might be a good addition to his Earth-friendly home. So he did a Web search for “GE geo spring water heater.” What he found wasn’t Earth or anything else-friendly! SEO poisoning galore:...

Imagine that you’re sitting at home catching up on your email backlog. In comes an email from your ISP, FooBarBazCo (some creativity required here, I know). The email seems to be from Technical Support – ‘From: FooBarBazCo.com Team’ – and states that you need to update your email settings as a result of a recent security upgrade. Can you trust it? Today we observed an increase in spam messages containing links to a particular malicious URL....