Tag: worm
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April Storm
April Fools’ Day emails contain new variant of infamous worm. Security researchers report a new wave of spam emails being sent out. The emails, which use subject lines such as ‘Gotcha! April Fool!’ or ‘Surprise! The joke’s on you.’, contain a small piece of text, an image as well as a link to an IP-based…
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Microsoft research revives ‘friendly worm’ ideas
Malware techniques proposed as update-spreading method. A group of Microsoft researchers have put forward proposals to use worm techniques to spread patches and updates across networks, reopening an age-old debate on the possibility of ‘beneficial malware’. The research, to be presented at the INFOCOM conference in April by a team from Microsoft ‘s Cambridge, UK,…
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First virus-writing arrests in Japan
Winny worm authors brought to book – for copyright violation. Japan has seen its first ever arrests of virus writers, with three men taken into custody in Kyoto last week and charged with creating worms targeting the Winny file-sharing platform. While no specific virus-writing offence exists under Japanese law, the men were charged with copyright…
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Polyglot worm spreads through MSN
Worm changes language to target wide audience. A new worm has been discovered that spreads through MSN Messenger . Once active, the worm opens random TCP ports to connect to an IRC server and then uses this connection to open a backdoor on the affected machine, allowing an attacker to issue commands locally. The worm,…
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Symbian worm sighted in the wild
Malware pretends to be media or image file. A new worm has been sighted in the wild that operates on the Symbian operating system, which is used on many mobile phones. The worm, which researchers at F-Secure have called SymbOS/Beselo, shares many similarities with the SymbOS/Commwarrior worm that was first seen nearly three years ago…
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Batch of Dutch MP3 players ships with malware
Worm included as unwanted extra for music lovers. A shipment of MP3 players sold in recent months by Dutch firm Victory has been found to be infected with the Fujacks worm, which exploits autorun settings in Windows to be activated when a device is connected to a computer. The incident follows a series of similar…
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Fujacks/Panda virus authors sentenced, offered job
Fujacks author put away for four years. Four men who were charged last month with writing, selling and spreading the W32/Fujacks virus and worm (a.k.a. the ‘Panda burning joss-sticks’ virus) have been sentenced in a Chinese court, with the self-confessed author of the virus being sent to prison for four years. But 25-year-old lead programmer…
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New worm spreading via Skype
Multilingual malware posing as porn in chat messages. VoIP and chat system Skype has been targeted by another worm, sending chat messages to harvested contacts posing as links to pornographic images, which in fact download and install copies of the worm. The new malware has been variously dubbed ‘Pykspa.D’, ‘Skipi.A’, ‘Ramex.a’ and ‘Pykse.b’. The fake…
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Four charged with writing Fujacks
Malware authors and sellers appear in Chinese court. Four men have appeared in a public court in Hubei Province, China, charged with writing, selling and spreading the W32/Fujacks virus and worm, often referred to as the ‘Panda burning joss-sticks’ virus in reference to the icon marking infected files in some variants. The W32/Fujacks family of…
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AVK tops latest AV-Test charts
Top four beat 99% in large collection scan. Testers at AV-Test.org have run 29 products over a massive collection of malware samples, with detection rates measured against 874,822 items including worms, trojans, bots and backdoors. The top two were multi-engine products, with GDATA ‘s AntiVirusKit ranked number one with 99.88% detection, and the Webwasher gateway…