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…
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…
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…
In this post I want to highlight how SEO attacks are working: Pages using server side kits to fool search engine bots into ranking them high in results are uploaded to legitimate web sites. If all goes to plan, when a user searches for a popular term, high up in the search engine results are…
Earlier this week Sophos informed a UK Local Police Authority (Hertfordshire) that a website they owned was infected with Troj/IFrame-DY. It turns out that the Police Authority has a new site and the infected site is an old one that just leads the user to the new site: Unfortunately, the old site also contains a malicious script, appended…
Imagine that you’re sitting at home catching up on your email backlog. In comes an email from your ISP, FooBarBazCo (some creativity required here, I know). The email seems to be from Technical Support – ‘From: FooBarBazCo.com Team’ – and states that you need to update your email settings as a result of a recent…
Herndon, Va., forensics firm NetWitness has said that the Zeus botnet has breached the networks of nearly 2,500 organizations in nearly 200 countries, including 10 U.S. federal agencies. NetWitness researchers said many victims are Fortune 500 companies in energy, finance and high tech sectors. NetWitness based its conclusions on information from a 75-gigabyte collection of…
Evgeny Legerov, founder of Intevydis in Moscow, has created an exploit that hits a previously unknown heap-corruption vulnerability in the Firefox browser. The code isn’t readily available though, since he’s put it in a module to the automated exploitation system he sells (reportedly at a considerable price.) Legerov has not provided information on the vulnerability…
“Dammed thieves. Stole our logo. I suppose we should be flattered, though.” — A.E. Old rogue, new package: AntivirusProtectionCenter \ av2009.exe : \ crc6:7f3d73762762 \ crc8:003091628c68decc \ md5:d71d1e303ab963fdae76936ba52a05b7\ AMC.exe : \ crc6:1d6922972762 \ crc8:003005cfbb91b729 \ md5:e5555754fd758fc2be1374796f9433e2\ Hash’s different from their PersonalAntiMalware added 2/16/2010 opener_.exe : \ crc6:8ee75c08081d \ crc8:00dc55e5aaa82efa \ md5:5bb290cd1eb419ca98ca1f31273f7219\ “It’s the same gang…