Displaying items by tag: Malware

It seems that LinkedIn cannot catch a break. After a rather large data breach that resulted in the theft of a large number of user account information (including unsalted passwords protected by an outdated encryption scheme) there is now a new phishing email making the rounds that is aimed specifically at LinkedIn users.  Although phishing emails that target users of social networks are nothing new this one is the first that we have seen that targets LinkedIn users and also appears to be sent directly to LinkedIn user email addresses.

The Russian team from Dr. Web today announced they have spotted a new Trojan for Android, which they named Android, well TheAndroid.DDoS.1.origin. It's not clear how the Trojan spreads - it is assumed that the authors use social engineering; affected users thought that they were installing legitimate software from Google on their smartphones. This is a very common tactic in the relatively open Google Play store and has been one of the problems that both Apple and Microsoft have used against Google in their battle for smartphone supremacy.

Kaspersky Lab has issued an annual report for 2012. This report presents some interesting statistics about malicious software that have marked the past year. The data that was analyzed by the well-known antivirus company using KSN system in the cloud (Kaspersky Security Network) to detect and collect information about attacks, points to more interesting things.

It is no longer a secret that along with the development of operating systems for smart phones, viruses, hacks and other malicious software for them is also developed. We could almost say that the viruses from the computer are moving to mobiles. One of the latest pieces of malicious software that was detected by specialists from CA Technologies is a Trojan horse that is able to record all your phone calls and store them on hacker’s servers.

Two spammers from Great Britain have received a large penalty for sending spam to mobile phones, according to the BBC. They were given a penalty in the amount of 440,000 pounds. The duo was emitting around 840,000 texts daily through the company they founded to recipients who without a doubt did not want to receive those messages. They "wasted" about 70 SIM cards daily that were connected through the device to the computer and then they used them to spam the messages until they used all available limits.

It is not hard to find false or malicious applications in Google's application store Play and every once in a while they get even more interesting. This time, they were applications that were made to look like they were from the iLife and iWork suites, whose editor was, neither more nor less than - Apple Inc..

According to Bloomberg, Google's application store (Google Play) has grown to over 700,000 titles. Hereby, Apple has lost the advantage according to the number of applications available for the platform, and is now tied with Google. The Android giant has certainly done some work to improve their numbers, like publishing guides for developers on how to develop the games specifically for Android, or just port them to it from other platforms.

Looking at the picture below you are probably thinking “Whoa! Way to go Adele!” but that's not what is this post about. Apparently Facebook has started to massively delete fake accounts, and by those numbers it certainly looks like they have got their hands full. One of most impressive falls is Zyngas's Texas HoldEm Poker, they lost over 96000 fans after this operation started. Illegitimately created accounts, malware likes, or likes from compromised accounts are being removed.

It looks like there is a simple hack, containing of only one line of code that can start an unstoppable factory reset on the Samsung Galaxy S3. According to security researchers there is a simple USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) code that can do some serious harm to S3 owners. USSD is a session based GSM protocol unlike SMS and MMS, and it is used to send messages between a mobile phone and an application server. With the advancements in technology there are more than few services based on USSD, some of them are social networking apps, mobile banking, prepaid recharge/account balance, even the NFC technology and QR codes.

On Friday Microsoft released an update for Flash on Windows 8 to protect their users from hacker attacks that could’ve started long ago since the bugs were here for quite some time. As it was stated about a week ago, Microsoft decided to take care of this bug and provided a patch for it Firday. Even though Flash Player is a product of Adobe, the whole work had to be done by Microsoft because they copied Google's Chrome and implemented Flash Player into their browser, Internet Explorer 10. They announced the implementation in May, saying “By updating Flash through Windows Update, like IE, we make security more convenient for customers.”