TED Talks | Misha Glenny: Hire the hackers!

9/11 Spam/Scam Preparations

Get ready for massive spam, scam, fake charities and scareware in general on the 10th Anniversary of the WTC attacks of 9/11. Most security blogs and AV companies are posting their concerns about that day and prepare their services for the onslaught of malicious content.

Post by ESET.

Microsoft is poking Google

Microsoft's latest Office 365 campaign is punching Gmail Man in the face, for peeking inside your emails to display relative ads. This is true, for the web client. If you access your email from a desktop client, you get rid of all the pesky ads. Google is claiming that algorithms do the dirty job and no human ever sees the contents of your email. Which of course would be ridiculous to think that humans can manage to scan billions of emails every day.

Winehouse Dies, Spammers Get To Work

It's tragic to see a 27year old woman die, and more tragic to see how inhumane people can be. Symantec posted on their blog that spammers got to work early on, when the news about the death of the singer was still being scares. Taking advantage of the human curiosity. The attack vector used by the spammers was an email containing an attachment, "loosely disguised" as an image, with the subject related to Winehouse's death.

Read the entire post here.

Twitter scam alert!

If you got a Direct Message in twitter saying: "Someone said this real bad thing about you in a blog" with a short URL following the message! DON'T CLICK! You'll only get infected/hacked/hijacked... etc ;)

Facebook Scam Alert!

If you see a Wall post about a video on the Oslo bombings, it's a scam and it will infect your computer. Avoid clicking!

Android Phone Owners, beware of malware!

Symantec posted an article on their security blog about the ever increasing threat of malware on smartphones, particularly smartphones running the Android OS platform. So android smartphone owners, beware of malware!

Tips:
Even if a piece of software is coming from an official source, like the Android Market, it doesn't make it safe or secure. Even reputable developers might have a ticking time bomb waiting on their apps.

Make sure to always read the comments and see the ratings on any software you're about to install on your smartphone. Always search the web for even more info about that software. Read all the requested permissions before installing, be suspicious of software requiring an endless list of permissions.

Read more about it here.

Are we loosing the internet?

Found a good speech about internet security threats by Mikko Hypponen, an internet security researcher employed by F-Secure.

Cyber Attack Victims Keep Pilling Up

Cyber attack victims keep pilling up, this time the target was CCP's MMO EVE-Online. At the time of this writing, the game's official site and the game network itself were offline. The group behind the attack was LulSec, and they posted a tweet on their Twitter profile about the successful DDoS attack on CCP's networks.

Update: CCP took down the entire network as a security precaution.

Yet another victim of Cyber attacks

Another big brand has come under attack by cyber criminals. This time it was Codemasters. Codemasters informed their customers via email to take action and change their passwords.

Kaspersky AV & Internet Security 2012

Kaspersky Lab announced the availability of its new security products, Kaspersky Lab Anti-Virus 2012 and Kaspersky Lab Internet Security 2012. The new products come with several improvements, but nothing revolutionary groundbreaking.

Both products will make it harder for rootkits to take over your computer and even harder to disable your security features.

A new graphical environment was created, for better access to monitoring tools and system status information. The new environment is also designed to support touch input devices.

According to Kaspersky Lab, the products will offer improved protection for the cloud, and new heuristic technologies will do a much better job identifying phishing sites.

The System Watcher can roll back to previous versions of your system files that were changed by malware, very useful for repairing the damage done by malicious applications.

Full details and pricing can be found at their official product pages, as well as 30 day trials for your to test the product before you purchase.
Kaspersky Lab Anti-Virus 2012
Kaspersky Lab Internet Security 2012

Is your password secure?

Found this website that tells you if your password is secure enough. My password would take 6 trillion years to crack, so I think I'm using a fairly secure password.

Check yours here: LINK

W32.Qakbot

Symantec posted on their blog an info-graphic about the consistently troublesome W32.Qakbot malware. A malware that's been around for over 2 years now and has caused serious trouble to thousands of computer users.

Sony hacked again?

BBC Technology reports that SONY may have been hacked again. The hackers have claimed that they gained access to a million user accounts information.

I just made 6.500.000 USD today. Not!

Symantec issued a warning for spam attacks on their blog. This time the spammers are targeting the Indian Premier League fans. The spam message is promoting an IPL lottery and asks it's victims to provide their personal details, Full name, date of birth, address, email and mobile number to claim the “(Rs/-56,80,708.00) Fifty Six Lacs Eighty Thousand Seven Hundred and Eight India Rupees”.

Sony hacked again?

It appears that a Greek site of Sony BMG was hacked. SonyMusic.gr The attackers or attacker, used an automated SQL injection tool to find a security hole in some input form. The attack was a success and the hackers got a hold of all the user records of the database. The database information then was posted in pastebin.com including usernames, real names and email addresses of users registered on SonyMusic.gr

Source: Sophos.com

Latest news on PSN

We temporarily took down the PSN and Qriocity password reset page. Contrary to some reports, there was no hack involved. In the process of resetting of passwords there was a URL exploit that we have subsequently fixed.

Consumers who haven’t reset their passwords for PSN are still encouraged to do so directly on their PS3. Otherwise, they can continue to do so via the website as soon as we bring that site back up

New spam campaign on Facebook

If you see a message in Facebook like the following: "YO! [username] what are you doing in this vid?" Just ignore the this message. It is just another scam, to make another spammer some money.

Read the full blog post from Symantec here.

Beware of rogue Defragger software

Symantec is warning user to be wary of rogue software posing as legitimate system restoration utilities. Trojan.Fakefrag takes over the victims computer, rendering it useless until the user buys their restoration software for a mere 79.50$.

Facebook Security Hole Fixed

Nishant Doshi, a Symantec employee, wrote in a blog entry that Symantec discovered that certain Facebook applications inadvertently leaked access tokens to third parties like advertisers or analytic platforms.

According to an estimate by Symantec there were close to 100.000 applications that enabled the leakage of information. These apps were leaking access tokens to third parties.

This security issue was reported to Facebook by Symantec and Facebook took action to fix the issue on their back-end systems.

Read the blog entry here.