Security

Sunbelt: Be wary of emails claiming to be from AICPA – as per their alert here, these are not real and any mention of “unlawful tax return fraud” is just a bait to convince the end-user to open up a malicious attachment (in this case, a .doc file although there are rogue PDF files in circulation too). As with many of the malicious spam campaigns doing the rounds at the moment, this one will use the Blackhole exploit kit to serve up zbot from multiple compromised domains. Worse, a Sakura kit (typical example here) will download Sirefef / ZeroAccess , which as we’ve seen elsewhere is not a good thing to have on your system. ...

Symantec Connect: Maslenitsa (Маслница) is a religious holiday celebrated in Russia and Ukraine during the last week before Lent, i.e. the seventh week before Pascha (Easter). This festival is also known as Pancake week or Butter week. During this week people enjoy the social activities that are forbidden during the prayerful Lenten season, such as partying, dancing etc. This year the Maslenitsa will be celebrated from February 20 to February 26. ...

SophosLabs: Scammers are up to their old tricks on Facebook, tricking users into visiting revenue-generating survey scam websites by appearing to offer sex videos. Using a thumbnail which suggests a link to a sex video, messages posted on compromised Facebook users’ walls attempt to lure their unsuspecting Facebook friends into clicking to see more. And if the use of a saucy snapshot of a naked man and woman in an intimate pose wasn’t enough, the messages also include a variety of names (obscured in the images below) – presumably these are the names of the afflicted users’ Facebook friends. ...

The H-Online: Google’s solution for the problem of getting better passwords on the net – a combination of browser sign-in andOpenID – will take some time to implement as it involves persuading sites to switch to using OpenID. The developers on the Chrome project think that they can at least improve the security of passwords on sites, by generating passwords for the user. A new Password Generation proposal for the Chromium and Chrome browsers attempts to address that by assuming that once the user is signed into the browser, it can take over the handling of password creation. ...

The H-Online: The Mozilla Project has released updates to Firefox and Thunderbird. According to the release notes, the version 10.0.2 updates to the open source web browser and the news and email client address a security vulnerability; however, at the time of writing, the project’s security pages provide no details of what has been fixed; these releases came soon after a Chrome update which closed 13 security holes and took the version number to 17.0.963.56. ...

The H-Online: Tenable has released version 5.0 of Nessus, its popular vulnerability scanner. The new version of the tool includes an updated installation wizard that is said to make installing and configuring the server and client easier and quicker than before. Scan policies can now be created substantially faster than with previous versions, and the developers have also improved the way users navigate through the results of a vulnerability audit. ...

Symantec: The world is mourning the loss of another legendary pop singer also known as the queen of pop – Whitney Houston. Spammers are paying homage to the icon with a wicked malware. The malicious email shows a video of the last appearance of the star in a Los Angeles night club and also downloads an executable binary. This file is detected by Symantec Antivirus as WS.Reputation.1. ...

SophosLabs: Here’s a spam message I received today: Hi GCLULEY, Hi. Why the caps? And just “Graham” would be fine. Do you find ONLY having a South African passport limiting? I don’t have a South African passport, but I haven’t found its absence very limiting. Do you find your travel choices abroad restricting and visa applications frustrating? Not particularly. Do you have an exit strategy if South Africa becomes the next Zimbabwe? ...

H-Online: Adobe has released updates for Flash Player closing seven holes in the application. Six of the holes can be exploited to allow an attacker to infect a PC using crafted web pages. The seventh is a cross site scripting hole that Adobe says is already being exploited in “active targeted attacks”. The attacks, which are only aimed at Internet Explorer on Windows, try to trick the user into clicking on a malicious link. Adobe say the hole “could be used to take actions on a user’s behalf on any website or webmail provider, if the user visits a malicious website”. ...

SophosLabs: The death of pop superstar Whitney Houston made headlines around the world this weekend, and it didn’t take long for fraudsters and cybercriminals to cash in on the singer’s death. For instance, messages have been seen shared on Facebook claiming to link to a video of Whitney Houston’s autopsy. According to the messages, the video of Whitney Houston’s autopsy “reveals a shocking secret that explains her death”. ...