Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Phishing for different markets
Scam emails trying to steal CO 2 emission credits and World-of-Warcraft accounts. Two unrelated phishing campaigns seen doing the rounds recently show that it’s not just real money that criminals are trying to steal via email scams. The first campaign targets EU-based companies and attempts to gain access to accounts with the EU Emission Trading…
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All change at the top for ESET
VB regulars Richard Marko and Andrew Lee appointed to top management roles. Congratulations are due to Richard Marko and Andrew Lee as they take up new positions within ESET . The company announced earlier this week that its owners Miroslav Trnka, Rudolf Hrubý, Maros Grund and Anton Zajac will be stepping down from the day-to-day…
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New peer-to-peer botnet discovered
New botnet shares fast flux DNS and other similarities with Storm and Waledac. In the last few days of 2010, security researchers discovered a new botnet that shares many similarities with the Waledac and Storm botnets. The botnet started with a spam campaign that sent millions of emails claiming to be holiday e-cards – a…
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Hefty Patch Tuesday bulletin rounds off bumper year
No sign of an end to vulnerability glut. Microsoft released its monthly Patch Tuesday security bulletin yesterday, with details of a hefty 17 alerts covering 40 separate vulnerabilities. Although only two of this month’s haul were marked as ‘Critical’, many others could be used to launch malicious attacks on vulnerable systems. The Critical alerts included…
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Chinese whispers of malware writing and bribery in the industry
As China corruption scandals rumble on, more rumours of malware writers in AV firms surface. Several recent stories in the media have revolved around China and malware writers, with the much confusion as to the real facts. After rumours last week that Spanish security firm Panda had hired the Chinese author of the Fujacks virus,…
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774,000 Avast! pirates on 14-user licence
Wildly popular free solution not good enough for some. Leading provider of free anti-malware products Avast Software has spotted that a single 14-user licence key, issued last summer to a customer in Arizona, is being used by over three quarters of a million pirates, who got hold of the key code after it made its…
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Russian ATM hackers arrested
Gang used customized malware bought on hacker forum. Police in the Siberian city of Yakutsk have arrested a gang of hackers who had installed malware on ATMs throughout the city. The group of criminals appears to have had a very professional structure, with different members performing different roles within its organization. The writing of the…
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18 months for member of m00p gang
Hacker receives prison sentence. A Scottish man who pleaded guilty last month to ‘causing unauthorized modification to the content of computers’ as part of his involvement in the m00p hacking group has been sentenced to 18 months in prison. Today’s sentencing was the culmination of a joint operation between the UK’s Metropolitan Police and Finnish…
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Survey reveals apathy surrounding anti-malware protection
Inconvenient subscription models preventing UK consumers from protecting their PCs adequately. A survey conducted in the UK by security firm GFI Software has revealed that 40% of respondents would rather let their anti-malware software lapse at the end of the initial subscription period than pay to renew the subscription, while 15.3% said that they would…
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Royal engagement search results poisoned
Hackers take the shine off Royal couple’s news. It will come as little surprise to those in the IT security industry to hear that within minutes of yesterday’s announcement of the engagement of Prince William to Kate Middleton, links to malicious sites had started to appear in Google searches relating to the happy couple’s news.…
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