Topic: Virus

Posted by : Anonymous on Thursday, January 06, 2005 - 12:35 AM

LOS ANGELES, Dec 29, 2004 (Xinhua via COMTEX) -- Computers running Microsoft Windows XP can be infected by a new Trojan horse, program remotely controlled in a victim's system, even after it is patched with Microsoft's latest Service Pack 2, IT security company Symantec warned Wednesday. The program -- dubbed "Phel", an anagram of "Help" -- infects visitors to a malicious website through Internet Explorer's Help controls, Symantec warned in an advisory.

Posted by : Anonymous on Sunday, October 31, 2004 - 09:15 PM

IT security experts have warned that a newly intercepted mutant of the infamous mass-mailing Bagle worm, dubbed Bagle.bb, has begun to spread rapidly across the internet. Over one million email infections were reported within a few hours of the virus being discovered in the wild on Friday morning. The peak infection rate was between 8am and 9am, when virus infection rates trebled from the hour previously, according to email security company BlackSpider Technologies.

Posted by : Anonymous on Thursday, September 23, 2004 - 03:00 AM

The IT industry's war against virus writers has seen battles won on both sides this year. Sven Jaschan, the 18-year-old German responsible for spreading 70 per cent of viruses in the first six months of 2004, faces a maximum of five years imprisonment after being charged earlier this monthBut his Netsky and Sasser computer worms have, so far, caused an estimated $6.25bn in damage, according to analyst Computer Economics, infecting hundreds of organisations worldwide, including the UK Coastguard, Heathrow Airport and the European Commission.

Posted by : Anonymous on Tuesday, September 07, 2004 - 08:25 AM

A recent report by the New York-based computer-security firm MessageLabs seems to confirm what once was mere speculation: Computer virus writers and spammers are in league with one another. MessageLabs bases its assessment on an analysis of about 5.6 million e-mail messages its clients dispatched between January and June, plus industry research. The company scans about 50 million e- mail messages daily for a variety of customers worldwide, among them the British government and the Bank of New York.

Posted by : Anonymous on Saturday, August 14, 2004 - 01:24 AM

Mobile phone users should beware of being bitten by Mosquito, a Trojan masquerading as a game but designed to send out premium-rate SMS messages without the user's consent. One of the first examples of malicious software aimed at mobile phone users, the Trojan has been hidden in a pirated game that describes itself as Mosquito v2.0. But while the mosquito-shooting game is being played, the Trojan makes the handset send out text messages at premium rates.

Posted by : Anonymous on Thursday, August 05, 2004 - 08:16 PM

An 18-year-old German schoolboy was responsible for 70 per cent of all viruses affecting businesses and homes in the first half of 2004.And according to a report from security software firm Sophos, the number of new viruses being written is on the increase with 1,157 detected during July - the highest figure since December 2001.

Posted by : Anonymous on Sunday, July 04, 2004 - 10:08 PM

Web and e-mail content filtering company SurfControl (London: SRF) has advised that the new Zombie and Trojan horse online threats require layered security strategies to be put into place.

Posted by : Anonymous on Wednesday, June 02, 2004 - 06:50 AM

Sterling McBride spends a lot of time waiting for spammers to make a mistake. They usually do.
When he hunted down escaped prisoners for the U.S. Marshals Service, McBride learned the value of lying low until fugitives trip up, leaving small clues to their whereabouts. Now, as an investigator for Microsoft, McBride watches carefully for tidbits of data that link some of the two billion pieces of junk e-mail that Microsoft's Hotmail service receives each day with the people who send them. Once he finds an electronic key to the spammer's identity a real name, address or phone number McBride uses all the tools of a regular detective: trailing suspects, subpoenaing their bank records and looking for disgruntled former associates to become informers. But first he must lift the cloak of anonymity provided by the Internet."The guys who do this are pretty tenacious," McBride said. "There are networks that are very well organized. But we have really started to figure out how they operate."

Posted by : Anonymous on Wednesday, June 02, 2004 - 06:49 AM

Antivirus companies have reportedly been sent a proof-of-concept virus that infects 64-bit Microsoft Windows machines.The virus, which has been named Rugrat by Symantec and McAfee, is believed to be the first example of its kind. It appends itself to executables on IA64 Windows machines, and also affects 32-bit computers with 64-bit emulators.

Posted by : Anonymous on Monday, May 31, 2004 - 08:57 AM

Information security company Symantec Corp (Nasdaq: SYMC) has certified the QualysGuard Enterprise offering as interoperable with the Symantec Security Management System. QualysGuard Enterprise is provided by Qualys Inc, a provider of on-demand network security audits and vulnerability management.