Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Rumours of killer mobile malware travel from Pakistan to Afghanistan. The effects of a possible prank which sparked considerable public panic in one country have travelled to a neighbouring nation, as concern about a mobile phone virus has been passed by word of mouth across the border. Fears of a deadly virus spreading via mobile…

Zero-day vulnerability quickly used to transmit attacks. The zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft ‘s DNS server service, reported last week just after the release of the monthly ‘Patch Tuesday’ security updates, has been rapidly implemented into at least two variants of a worm which is spreading in the wild via the flaw. Exploits began to emerge,…

Messaging attack hides behind photo of girl in stilettos. More malware has been reported spreading through the Skype API, sending links to itself to addresses gathered from infected machines and tweaking local settings to block further contacts via the system. The messages sent via the Skype messaging network claim to link to sexy pictures, and…

Rivals improve record to leave US spamming rate a standout. The US remains the world’s leading source of spam, easily beating off competition from rivals China and several European nations, according to reports out this week. Sophos ‘s quarterly ‘ Dirty Dozen ‘ list shows the US way out in front, producing or relaying almost…

Latest wave of variants followed up by further fake warnings. Yet another wave of malware has been widely spammed out, using similar tactics to previous attacks evolving from the weather and war warnings seen either side of Christmas to waves of Valentine’s messages in February, and this time followed by a second wave carrying warnings…

ICSA announces cooperative forum of anti-spam developers. CyberTrust -owned ICSA Labs has announced the formation of the Anti-Spam Product Developers’ Consortium , a grouping of product vendors aimed at providing greater cooperation and knowledge-sharing within the industry. The coalition plans to meet regularly to discuss issues and devlopments in world of the spam and spam-fighting,…

Security update release cycle leads to attack release cycle. With the monthly ‘Patch Tuesday’ issue of security updates over, the now customary revelations of further vulnerabilities has begun, with attackers giving their creations as much time as possible to take effect before any fix is likely. After some six separate holes in Windows and other…

Fix for earlier .ani patch and another Vista issue included in batch. Five out of six vulnerabilities patched by Microsoft yesterday, in April’s ‘Patch Tuesday’ monthly security update, are labelled ‘critical’ and can be used to execute remote code on victim machines. Four of the five affect Windows core systems, while the fifth only affects…

New minority platform joins infectable list. Virus analysts have reported receiving samples of a proof-of-concept virus for the iPodLinux operating system, a port of the open-source platform to Apple ‘s popular media-player device. The proof-of-concept is far from stable and has fairly limited functionality, requiring manual installation and launching, but once running can infect .elf…