Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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‘Olympic’ emails contain malicious XLS attachments
Malware writers sprint to use vulnerabilities before next Patch Tuesday. Security researchers have reported seeing emails containing XLS attachments designed to exploit a yet unpatched vulnerability in several versions of Microsoft ‘s Excel software. The attachment, which purports to contain information about this summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing, leaves a trojan on the user’s computer.…
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Spammer’s free speech defence fails
Appeal against conviction turned down. US spammer Jeremy Jaynes, the first spammer convicted in a felony case, has had his last appeal against the conviction, brought on freedom of speech grounds, turned down by a Virginia supreme court. After a 2003 spamming spree accounting for several million messages in a two-month period, Jaynes was convicted…
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IE8 to include malware filtering
New features list includes upgrade to security provision. The next version of Microsoft ‘s Internet Explorer web browser, IE8 , could include malware detection as standard, in an improvement to the current phishing filter provided in IE7 . Details of a range of new additions to the browser accompanied the recent beta of IE8 ,…
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Showy malware pushes rogue anti-malware product
MonaRonaDona trojan leads searchers to remover scam. An infection which advertises its presence using the name ‘MonaRonaDona’ is leading victims to search for a cure – and many of them are finding a targeted rogue anti-malware application widely promoted on the web as a dedicated fix for the problem. In stark contrast to the stealth…
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Cybercriminals charged in New Zealand, Korea
Law closes in on alleged botnet master and rogue anti-spyware maker. Police in New Zealand have charged an 18-year-old in connection with a botnet he is suspected of building and controlling, while in South Korea the head of a company pushing a rogue anti-malware product has also been indicted on fraud charges. In the New…
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‘Search engines should do more to fight malware’
85% of users think that search engines should be doing more. According to a recent poll, 85% of visitors to the VB website think that search engines should be doing more to fight malware, but experts say the matter is more complicated than that. A recent paper by researchers at Google revealed that more than…
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March issue of VB published
The March issue of Virus Bulletin is now available for subscribers to download. The March 2008 issue of Virus Bulletin is now available for subscribers to browse online or download in PDF format. Some of the things this month’s issue has in store are: Home (page) renovations : ‘We often hear from VB conference delegates…
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Gmail CAPTCHA cracked
Twenty per cent success rate sufficient to create thousands of spam accounts. Gmail has become the latest free webmail service to have its CAPTCHAs cracked by spammers. Following the recent news of the Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Mail CAPTCHAs having been cracked, the news of Gmail ‘s CAPTCHA being surpassed will come as little…
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Trend Micro buys email encryption firm
UK company taken over by security giant. Global security superpower Trend Micro has invested in a small email encryption firm based in Bristol, UK. The company, Identum , emerged from Bristol University’s cryptography department five years ago, and markets an AES-based encryption software under the name Private Post , using public keys generated from a…
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Botnet-herding team arrested in Quebec
Gang held for managing million-machine zombie net. Canadian police have announced the arrests of up to 17 people in Quebec, in connection with a major botnet operation thought to have controlled as many as 1 million compromised systems all around the world. The Quebec and national police were behind a series of raids across the…
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