In the last 24 hours, we have seen a huge increase in the number email-borne threats - these emails are coming into email addresses with a financial leaning - ie, anything relating to billing, invoicing or payments - all the emails contain hidden calls to websites with infection vectors for windows PC- so...

be careful . . .

• do not open emails from people you do not know - but even the "preview" in Outlook and some other email programs can load this threat!


• keep your antivirus up to date


• update your windows and other software

Posted by Greg Hewitt-Long in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 10:41

Security researchers believe hackers are altering botnet for use as crimeware toolkit to be licensed to other cyber criminals

By Lucian Constantin - IDG News Service

Experts from security vendor ESET warn that TDL4, one of the most sophisticated pieces of malware in the world, is being rewritten and improved for increased resilience to antivirus detection.

"ESET researchers have been tracking the TDL4 botnet for a long time, and now we have noticed a new phase in its evolution," announced David Harley, the company's director of malware intelligence.

Posted by Greg Hewitt-Long in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 14:47

By Kurt Marko

No, it's not the latest series on the Syfy network, much as affected companies may wish this trend were fiction.

The size of the smartphone malware "market" was made clear last week in a report issued by Damballa Labs that offers a rare analysis of mobile botnets. Now, if you've followed InformationWeek's Mobile Security Tech Center, you know that malware targeting mobile devices -- effectively smartphones, since the tablet market is owned by iPad, which has yet to see a successful malware penetration -- is on the rise. Today, breaking into connected devices and compromising online identities is big business, and smartphones are the next front in the cybercrime battlefield.

Damballa found that in the first half of this year, the number of compromised Android devices communicating with known criminal command and control (C&C) networks grew significantly, topping out at 20,000 devices on two particularly nasty weeks. This marks a disturbing milestone in the evolution of mobile malware, since until recently, mobile exploits typically didn't involve a persistent takeover of the device and active communication with a C&C botnet. As the report concludes, "two-way Internet communication now makes the mobile market as susceptible to criminal breach activity as desktop devices."

Posted by Greg Hewitt-Long in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 06:30

As Apple gains success and market share, hackers turn sights on operating system

By John R. Quain

You know you've finally arrived as a software platform when hackers start gunning for you.

Such is the predicament that Apple's success has brought: Sophisticated malware has started to appear that's directed specifically at Apple machines.

For years, security experts predicted that as Apple gained market share, cybercriminals would turn their attention from Windows machines toward Mac attacks. Now it appears to really be happening.

Apple's Mac OS X operating system now enjoys a market share of more than 15 percent in the U.S., according to Swedish Web-monitoring service Pingdom.

Coincidentally, in a 2008 paper written for the IEEE Computer Society, Cloudmark researcher Adam O'Donnell predicted that when Apple's market share reached a "tipping point" of roughly 16 percent, then hackers would begin targeting those systems.

According to other experts, that prediction now appears to be coming true.

Posted by Greg Hewitt-Long in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 10:29