The BBC is reporting that websites belonging to the Iranian oil ministry and national oil company are offline after suffering a malware infection this weekend. Iran has disconnected all of its oil processing facilities as a precaution, including the facility at Kharg Island which processes more than 90% of Iran’s exports. The semi-official news agency,…
SophosLabs is intercepting a spammed-out malware campaign, pretending to be an email about a revealing photo posted online of the recipient. The emails, which have a variety of subject lines and message bodies, arrive with an attached ZIP file (IMG0893.zip) which contains a Trojan horse. Subject lines used in the spammed-out malware campaign include: RE:Check…
SophosLabs: More malware for the Mac OS X platform has been discovered, hot on the heels of the revelation that some 600,000 Macs had been infected in the Flashback attack. And just like Flashback, the new Trojan doesn’t require any user interaction to infect your Apple Mac. The Sabpab Trojan horse exploits the same drive-by…
Anti-virus experts at Trend Micro have discovered ransomware which blocks systems from booting. In contrast to the localised trojans, which are widely spread around Europe, it does so by inserting itself into the master boot record (MBR). It then restarts the system and instructs the user to pay a ransom of 920 Ukrainian hryvnia (equivalent…
The H-Online: As expected, Apple has released an updated version of the Java implementation for its Mac OS X operating system that includes a removal tool for the Flashback trojan. According to the company, the update, labelled “Java for OS X 2012-003“, finds and removes the “most common variants” of the malware which had infected…
Android malware authors have seized an opportunity to infect unsuspecting smartphone users with the launch of the latest addition to the immensely popular “Angry Birds” series of games. SophosLabs recently encountered malware-infected editions of the “Angry Birds Space” game which have been placed in unofficial Android app stores. The Trojan horse, which Sophos detects as…
The H-Online: A Russian AV company, Dr. Web, says it has conducted research to determine the spread of the Flashback trojan on systems running Mac OS X and says that 550,000 systems are infected, mostly in the US and Canada. A later update raised that number to 600,000 and claimed 274 infected systems in Cupertino,…
The H-Security: On Tuesday, a user who is known as “lawabidingcitizen” posted an unusual request to the Full Disclosure mailing list, a forum that is mainly used by the security community: “Please do not take down the Sality botnet.” The contributor says that he found a way of dramatically reducing the number of infected computers…
SophosLabs: Jenna-Louise Coleman has been unveiled as the new “Doctor Who” companion, joining the BBC TV time traveller in his TARDIS later this year. “Doctor Who” is one of Britain’s biggest television shows, and is popular elsewhere around the world, so it was no surprise to find 25-year-old actress Jenna Louise-Coleman’s name was a trending…
Exploit found in Russian adware invades process, doesn’t install files The Register: Researchers at Kaspersky Labs have found malware which, unusually, does not install any files on its victims PCs. The researchers aren’t quite sure how unusual it is, describing it as both “unique” and “very rare”, but no matter how scarce this type of…