VirusTotal has been well known to most readers of the blog. It’s a free virus and malware online scan service which allows submitters to test a particular file against a multitude of malware scanners. So, it’s not highly surprising that malware authors would try to use that name to further their gain. Today we came across…
Are malware authors and spammers suffering from the same affliction of “word salad“, or are they perhaps devoted students of Afringlish? Why else would one combine random words in an attempt to look legitimate? The reason is a simple one – not only are humans good at associating meaning to names, they are also exceptionally good at filling…
The Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce began its 2010 Fraud Week campaign today with release of the first Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) scams activity report. Wednesday it will release information to help small businesses protect themselves. The March 1-7 Fraud Week hopes to reduce the incidence and impact of fraud and scams. The annual event tries…
Since yesterday evening, PlayStation 3 users have been reporting difficulties in connecting their consoles to the PlayStation Network for online gameplay and system updates. While it was first thought to be a network-related issue, Sony has warned that there is a much more widespread issue currently affecting older PlayStation 3’s. Sony’s offical statement lists the…
Since January we publish monthly reports about the categories of the spam messages which got sent around the last month. These categories are detected by Avira’s AntiSpam engine. Between January and February 2010 there didn’t change much in the spam landscape. The top 3 is still occupied by Pharmacy, Other (spams which don’t fit any…
We’ve been seeing a gradual shift in malicious PDF file coding (no surprise there, we know malware authors can and do adapt their techniques). For a long time, we saw malicious PDF files that were simple enough to allow us to readily decipher the intent of the malicious code — shell code, download/execute, drop and…
A massive earthquake struck near the Chilean city of Concepcion in the early hours of the morning of February 27th, 2010. The quake measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale was considerably stronger than the one that recently caused widespread destruction on the island of Haiti. Fortunately, despite the size of this latest quake, so far…
A few days ago, I blogged saying that Old websites don’t die they just get infected the other scenario is that they become part of a spammers SEO campaign. Working today, I went to check to see if the local police authority had cleaned up their old web page. So I wgetted the file and…
I have received a message this morning from an ICQ account with the following text written in UTF-8 and plain text: The message from ICQ.com ****** Hello. ICQ.com: we Remind you that all ICQ numbers which have not passed activation, 1.1.2010 will be removed from a server without restoration possibility. The status of yours ICQ…
People looking to take advantage of the savings from the government during these harder financial times are being hit with other financial burdens (Rogue AV software). Our (environmentally conscious) researcher Adam Thomas heard about a “green” hot water heater that might be a good addition to his Earth-friendly home. So he did a Web search…