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…
A survey of 54,000 households (129,000 people) commissioned by National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) last year found that 30 percent of U.S residents did not use the Internet at home or at work. The study, based on Census Bureau work, found that 64 percent of households had connections. In 2007, only 51 did. The…
Symantec recently upgraded their scanner on VirusTotal to include their new reputation-based security engine. That has caused a spike in their detection rates, in particular Suspicious.Insight detections, and so I thought I’d take a few minutes to explain some of the background and what is going on. So what exactly is a Suspicious.Insight detection? These detections are derived from…
Representatives of computer companies and governments meeting at the EastWest Institute security meeting in Brussels said that an industry culture of obscure jargon is preventing the world’s two billion Internet users from putting security measures in place to protect themselves. The group met to figure out how to protect computer users from massive abuse, fraud,…
Peter Coogan at Symantec put up a very interesting blog post yesterday about a crimeware kit called SpyEye v1.0.7 (on sale now on Russian sites — $500) that has a module that will kill a Zeus bot infection on a victim’s computer so the bot created by SpyEye can take it over. In September, Computer Weekly…
Many users have complained about Windows 7 strange Battery notification saying “Consider replacing your Batteries” on Laptops and there was a noise about it in Blogosphere but Microsoft has replied to it. There were many Forum posts and blog articles implying Windows 7 is falsely reporting this situation or even worse, causing these batteries to…
Our good friends at Broomfield, Colo., security firm eSoft have found an interesting scam to trick Internet users into installing the Hotbar adware: a fake Firefox download site. The eSoft researchers are theorizing that an affiliate of Pinball Publisher Network (PPB). is responsible. Pinball bought the Zango assets after that pestilent operation failed last spring….
Wired magazine has run a story on a phishing scam in Europe, New Zealand and Japan that resulted in the loss of 250,000 carbon credit permits worth $4 million from six companies. The phishing emails spoofed the German Emissions Trading Authority and said that the victim companies needed to re-register their accounts with the authority….
In recent weeks, various cybercrime attacks have disrupted the computer systems that allow nations to manage their national greenhouse-gas emissions quotas and their possession of carbon assets according to international agreements (the Kyoto Protocol and the European system). One quota is the right to emit the equivalent of one ton of carbon dioxide during a…
It has been a month since Sophos added detection for Troj/JSRedir-AK and figures generated today show that over 40% of all web-based detections have been from this malicious code. [Graph shows Malware hosted on websites from 2009-12-22 11:00:00 to 2010-01-21 11:00:00 (GMT-8)] Translating the numbers into a more human comprehensible form: 1 site every 15…