Crenk » Malware

Two Malicious Ad-Ons Made It Onto Firefox

Dean Sherwin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:01:12 +0000

A bit of an embarrassment for Mozilla Firefox – and it comes at a a bad time too, right when they’re loosing their dominance in the browser world as Chrome catches up.

Mozilla has been known as a very safe browser as compared to its old enemy, Internet Explorer. In fact, many people used it for just that reason. So the last thing Mozilla needed was reports of Malware in two ad-ons which were available for download from their website.

“Two add-ons in the experimental section of addons.mozilla.org were found to be containing malware,” Mozilla said on its security blog. “These were not originally detected with the anti-malware scanning tools that we have been using. We have since increased the number of scanning tools, and will be taking additional steps to minimize the risk of further incidents.

It is thought that well in excess of 4,000 downloads of the ad-ons have taken place since they were first released in September. So are you one of the thousands of people who inadvertently infected their own machines? Well if you downloaded Sothink 4.0 and all versions of Master Filer then there’s a good chance you are. These installed Win32.LdPinch.gen and Win32.Bitfrose.32.Bitfrose Trojan respectively. So if you have downloaded these, I suggest running a scan of your system ASAP.

Microsoft Free Antivirus Releasing Today

Augusto Alvarez — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:06:31 +0000

Microsoft has been working for a long time now in giving a good and reliable antivirus platform for all users. And when I say “for all users” I mean a free one. Seems that the dream is about to become true today: Microsoft Security Essentials will be release to the public as the free antivirus solution from Microsoft.

Microsoft Security Essentials will be replacing Windows Live OneCare as the security suite for viruses and malware. The suite can be installed in Windows XP, Vista and 7; and seems that already has a good review about the protection you can achieve, by giving you a shield for 97,8% of the existing malware in the web.

On the other side, some of the other reviews this antivirus platform has received so far say that the engine inside it is a little bit slow and intrusive with other applications.

And of course, leaders from other security solutions already are trying to tear this solution down, like McAfee: “will compete against other free solutions by offering limited security functionality”; or Symantec saying it is a “thin defense” and not giving you any type of antispam or identity safeguards.

Let people decide then.

Spam Increased 141%

Augusto Alvarez — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 17:50:55 +0000

Spam levels have increased in the last few months, since March more precisely, in a 141% said McAfee Threat Report from Second Quarter in 2009. The main reason resides in another increase: botnets (infected computers used for spamming and other attacks) up to 16%. Need an explicit number? That translates in 117 billion spam emails every day.

The number that is quite disturbing as well, is the botnets that are currently infected: 14 million computers. 150k every day, that represent 20% of all the computers that are acquired every day. And these botnets and zombies they are not only responsible for most of the spam, also they generated other attacks like denial-of-service to the White House, New York Stock Exchange and South Korean government web sites.

About South Korea, that’s the country that increased the most in the botnet activity, up to 45%; but yes, the US keeps in the top of that list with over 15% of the entire zombie population.

These spam numbers do not come alone, malware attacks have increased, specially the ones that infect the Windows auto-run that do not require any user intervention to “spread the evil”. That type of malware even outnumbered the Koobface or the Conflicker attacks.

This is a battle that will never end I think, I’m sure that those that depend on this kind of battles will not let it end.

What do you think?

Koobface Attacks and Twitter

Augusto Alvarez — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 13:33:30 +0000

Koobface malware found his way to infect thousands of Twitter users in the last days, increasing of course the number of Twitter updates giving messages like “My home video [url]“. The URL mentioned is listed randomly, all directing the traffic to a Koobface site.

Twitter’s reaction was fast and already suspended most of the users infected to avoid the virus from spreading. TrendMicro blogged about this and is already giving their users the solutions if they were infected.

This is apparently the second attack given by Koobface in Twitter, the first one used only three different TinyURLs with infected users; this malware mutation gave the infection a longer life than the previous one, that also appeared on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster and LiveJournal.

There’s no question about it, when you are that big, you will always have attackers and damage control will be needed.

Is YouTube Infected?

Luis Sandoval — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:24:41 +0000

: Image by via CrunchBase

It was reported over on Techcrunch and Crunchgear that there wa a virus that was running rampant across the YouTube network with the certain embedded videos. It was reported that Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox were targeted, later reports said it was just IE.

The virus was reportedly named Actns/Swif.T and contains a phishing scam that directs uses to a website with an embedded .SWF and then installs a program called “Antivirus 2009.” Users were warned of this potentially damaging malware by avoiding weird pop-ups, requests for personal information, or re-direction to unknown sites.

The story was later recanted as it appeared to be a YouTube specific situation. On the back end the virus protection service being used was returning false positives identifying code within certain embedded videos as malware. The entire incident is harmless, and there is no security breach on the YouTube network. Spokesperons from YouTube are handling the situation and ensure us that YouTube is currently safe and free of any malware problems.

Actns/Swif.T virus affecting embedded YouTube vids?