virus

According to a report by the Internet security firm AVG 7 of the 10 safest countries in which to use the Internet are in Africa, with Sierra Leone rated the safest. Researchers of the security vendor made up a list of virus and malware attacks by country picked up by AVG security software, with data from more than 127 million computers in 144 countries to determine incidence rates of such attacks. Average incident rate for Sierra Leone was one attack for every 692 Web surfers.

Sierra Leone was followed by Niger with one in every 442 surfers likely to be attacked while online.

A new malware was developed by cyber crooks to lure unwitting users into uninstalling legitimate anti-virus applications and instead using fake and useless software. A bogus package dubbed AnVi Antivirus generates a message that suggest that legitimate apps are “uncertified" and ought to be removed. Further the message threatens that if a user fails to take action his/her computer performance will degrade.

Smartphones are increasingly getting infected with different kind of malware and now they are even involved into botnets, as latest reports show.

Waledac botnet that was taken down in February this year is again waking up. As is known the court order ruled to close Waledac-related domains, depeer the botnet's peer-to-peer communications and take down the server.

While it may seem that Microsoft’s operation brought a success it was only superficial as it did nothing to clean up estimated 90,000 infected bot clients. While they were depeered they waited for their time to get up again.

The first malicious software that targets specifically Google’s Android operating system has been discovered by researchers at the security company Kaspersky Lab. According to the company blogpost the malware masquerades as a media player but in fact it secretly sends premium SMSes once it is installed on the device.

According to the report of security researchers that attended the Black Hat conference last week China is increasingly getting a leading marketplace for permitted hacking and malware making tools allowing criminal rings to create ‘production chains’ that develop and distribute technologies for producing malicious software.

A Washington Post security blogger Brian Krebs found that scareware victims in most cases do not claw back credit card payments for worthless software packages. Krebs contacted victims of scareware scams according to the list of users duped into buying rogue anti-virus packages. The data came from caches of data maintained by rogue anti-virus affiliates, a key sales channel for scareware developers.

More information was released on the arrest of a Slovenian hacker suspected of developing a code behind the Mariposa botnet. The 23-year old suspect is known only by his hacker nickname Iserdo. He was arrested in Maribor, Slovenia 10 days ago. Five months earlier Spanish police arrested three suspects who alleged used the Mariposa code to create a 12 million botnet.

Iserdo was arrested alongside with two other suspects in Slovenia as part of a joint FBI-Slovenian investigation that has since focused on the 23-year-old.

ESET has issued a warning against a worm dubbed Win32/Stuxnet exploiting a vulnerability in Windows® Shell. The virus has been detected by ESET as LNK/Autostart.A. It is used in targeted attacks to penetrate SCADA systems, especially in the United States and Iran. SCADA are supervisory and monitoring systems used in many industries, for instance in power engineering. 

Security firm Websense has found a new Trojan virus that exploits built-in Windows feature to disable all the PC security software and compromise systems. The malware comes under guise of an antivirus update and exploits Windows input method editor (IME) to infect a system.

IME technology is usually used to allow users to enter characters not supported with their input device. Thus, for instance, PC users with a 'Western' keyboard would take advantage of the technology to input Chinese or Japanese characters.

A scientist at the University of Reading deliberately infected himself (by way of an RFID chip implanted in his wrist) with a benign computer virus in an experiment meant to show the vulnerability and susceptibility of bionic devices to computer viruses.

While Apple’s much buzzed computer tablet iPad is yet to come for sale in the United Kingdom experts at BitDefender identified malware that targets early adopters of the device. In a junk email message cyber crooks promise "…best performance, newer features and security" if they follow the instruction and download the latest version of iTunes onto their PC to begin the update.

Users of smartphones are being tricked into downloading a malicious application that makes expensive international phone calls unseen for the user. Crooks have developed a pirated version of a Windows mobile game that contains a Trojan virus.

Qualys, a security risk and compliance management provider, reports that today nearly 10% of Windows systems it monitors for customers have not yet applied Microsoft 's MS08-067 security update. A year has passed since the gloomy reports that were telling about the Conficker worm and predicting that it would destroy the Internet but many users as is shown by the latest figures are still unprotected against it.

Kaspersky Lab announced the launch of a completely new product to protect TV users against malicious content like spam, cookies and other malware, as reported by the Russian media source SecurityLab.

According to some experts though there are no viruses targeting TV sets yet it won’t be a challenge to the wide popularity of the product.