malicious website

New malware is circulating on the Internet that infects Mac machines and tries to trick users into giving away their credit card data. According to Intego the malicious app called MacDefender hides on some webpages that use search engine optimization to spam the results of popular searches. On such infected websites users can see animation of a malware scam followed by a pop-up message telling users that their computer is infected. JavaScript on the page then automatically downloads a compressed ZIP file containing the malware.

Avast, a largest antivirus scanner, brought its apologies this week for wrongly defining most of the web as malicious. 

The latest report from NSS Labs reveals that most security companies need long time to update their malware dates and block malicious websites. The research shows that on average security software from major vendors can take about two days to block a website constructed to attack users’ PCs. During the study the researcher tested security applications against fresh malware found online.

Yesterday the Internet was disrupted for the second time in two weeks as a result of bad networking information spreading from China. On Thursday morning bad routing data that came from Chinese ISP called IDC China Telecommunication was re-transmitted by China's state-owned China Telecommunications. Having spread across the whole web space the routing affected Internet service providers such as AT&T, Level3, Deutsche Telekom, Qwest Communications and Telefonica.

An online security vendor M86 Security reported that many URL filters and antivirus applications fail to recognize a big volume of malicious URLs. The conclusions were made on the basis of the test performed by the company.

M86 Security used three leading but unnamed antivirus products against 15,000 malicious URLs and found that only 39% were blocked successfully.

Having screened the set of malicious URLs against a URL filter the company found that only 444, about 3%, were correctly detected.

 The Chinese Communist Party's main newspaper is (apparently without a trace of irony) accusing Google of unfairly censoring its website for having reported on the search firm's book-scanning copyright dispute.