Displaying items by tag: Malware

We are on the ground in Las Vegas, NV to cover Black Hat and DEF CON 2014. We will be bringing you coverage of the latest in hacks, exploits and the tools that are supposed to protect you from the “bad guys”. We also brought along some fun toys that are perfect to travel security. Granted nothing we brought it going to keep you 100% safe, but in the real world every little bit helps.

There is nothing like finding out that the application you bought to keep you safe on the internet can actually be used to insert malicious code. Well this is what AVG Secure Search toolbar users are finding out this morning as news of a vulnerability has hit the web. According to the report from CERT version 18.1.6 and older of AVG Secure Search and AVG SafeGuard install an Active X control that is just bad news.

Point of Sale Terminals are a new target for malicious individuals. At least this is a trend that many security researchers are seeing over the last few months. These systems can be a treasure trove of information for someone looking to make some quick money. On top of that most are designed with simple and generic logons to make use easier. This is a common flaw with many Windows based POS systems, yet the trend continues.

In the mid-late 1990s the computer world was rocked by a new plague that spread very quickly through most Windows PCs that were running any form of Microsoft Office. This was the Macro virus and there were plenty of examples of these nasty little bits of Microsoft enabled code were written in a form of Visual Basic called VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). Think of VBA as a stripped down version of the more powerful programing languages.

Our first bit of news this morning is a piece about the SEA (Syrian Electronic Army) hacking into an ad plug-in (widget) on the Reuters new page that allowed them to redirect readers to new landing pages. Now, while the hack is serious, at the time of this writing it does not appear there was any additional payload pushed out to end users. All that happened was readers looking for news stories were redirected to a new page that slammed western media.

Microsoft is joining the ranks of Symantec and McAfee in a very special group. This is a group of companies whose anti-malware products can be/have been attacked directly. According to a security update Microsoft says that a specifically crafted file can stop the service from working until manually removed.

Remember when we told you about the first ransomware for Android? No? Oh ok so let’s give you a quick background. Not that long ago some enterprising person came up with a way to use the locking portion of Find my iPhone to lock a number of iPhones in Australia. This started a number of rumors about the spread of this new threat to the iPhone including one that claimed iCloud had been hacked. In the end the number of locked phones was much smaller than reported and the users were able to get their phones back without paying out the relatively small ransom.

Nothing makes a Friday fun like hearing about a brand new form of Malware. Well that is what we have for you on today. It seems that an RSA researcher was picking around the darker places on the Internet and stumbled upon a new bit of malware that, if real, could be a serious problem in the near future. RSA researcher Eli Marcus is calling the new malware Pandemiya and claims that it is 25,000 lines of previously unused code.

Imagine opening up a webpage when suddenly you see a notice saying all of your files have been locked. You have a limited amount of time to send a ransom or you will lose all of your data. This is what many people faced when the CryptoLocker Malware hit the PC world by surprise. Even now with many command and control servers down this threat still looms out there. Now imagine that instead of your PC it was your phone. The number of people that actually backup their phones in any real way is very small. A bit of malware like this could be disastrous to some.

Whenever a new game hits the streets you can bet there will be a less-than-legal copy either right before, or right after. This was the case with the new game "Watch Dogs. Shortly before the retail release there were multiple copies available from different sources. One of the most popular sources was BitTorrent. Sadly, someone decided to taint that version with a bitcoin mining utility.