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  • Estonian virus writer sent to jail

    Author of Allapple virus sentenced. An Estonian man has been found guilty of creating and distributing the Allapple virus, and sentenced to a little over two and a half years in prison. The 44-year-old Artur Boiko pleaded not guilty to the charges, but was convicted based on evidence outlined by the prosecution which indicated that…

  • Morphing PDFs in new SEO poisoning trick

    Harmless documents replaced by web pages containing malicious code. Researchers at F-Secure have discovered a new SEO poisoning trick in which attackers put harmless PDFs on a website to raise the site’s profile in web searches but, after the site has been indexed by search engines, replace the PDFs with web pages containing malicious Flash…

  • Botnet taken down as ringleaders are arrested

    ‘Mariposa’ included almost 13 million zombies. Spanish authorities have managed to take down the Mariposa botnet – one of the largest of its kind which is believed to have infected in 12.7 million computers worldwide – as well as arresting three of its botherders. Stories of botnets being taken down have become more prevalent recently;…

  • Spammers move from China to Russia

    Stricter rules on registering .cn domains leads to increase in malicious .ru domains. A change in the rules of the organization responsible for registering .cn domains has resulted in a drop in the number of spam messages referencing Chinese top-level domains, with Russian domains moving in to fill the gap. Until recently, a large proportion…

  • Nearly 20% still running IE 6

    VB poll finds users still running outdated browser despite campaigns to boycott it. Despite widespread calls to boycott IE 6 and Microsoft ‘s plans to retire support for the browser, 19% of respondents in a Virus Bulletin poll said that they are still running the browser, whether at home, at work, or both. The browser…

  • Warrant issued for arrest of cyclist turned hacker

    Cyclist accused of planting trojan at dope testing lab. A French judge has issued a warrant for the arrest of US cyclist Floyd Landis in connection with a computer hacking case. Landis initially won the famous Tour de France cycle race in 2006, but was later stripped of his title when tests indicated that he…

  • Out-of-band patch release from Adobe

    Unscheduled update released by Adobe. Adobe has released an unscheduled patch for its Reader and Acrobat programs to address some critical flaws. The software company’s fixes usually follow a quarterly release schedule, and last month saw a bumper crop, so none were expected to be published this month, but the vulnerabilities in Reader and Acrobat…

  • Patch Tuesday release includes 13 bulletins

    26 vulnerabilities featured in sizeable update set. After a relatively quiet January, administrators are faced with a hefty workload this week as Microsoft ‘s monthly Patch Tuesday security release featured 13 updates covering 26 separate issues with Windows and other Microsoft software. In five bulletins labelled ‘Critical’, remote code execution problems with TCP/IP, SMB clients,…

  • EU report suggests 95% of email is spam

    Less than five per cent of all SMTP connections result in an email being delivered into a user’s inbox. A survey carried out by the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) among 92 internet and telecom providers suggests that less than five per cent of all SMTP connections result in an email being delivered…

  • Botnets becoming more robust

    Zeus botnet used Amazon’s in-the-cloud service to control bots. New reports by MessageLabs and McAfee show that botherders have learned a lesson following the take-down of McColo in November last year . McColo was a rogue ISP that was taken down after security researchers gathered evidence of suspicious activities on the provider’s network, with the…

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