Paul Roberts

All Eyes On Stuxnet At Annual Virus Researcher Summit

The world will know more about the mysterious Stuxnet virus by week’s end, after top virus researchers  reveal the findings of their post mortem on Stuxnet at the annual Virus Bulletin Conference. HED: All eyes on Stuxnet at annual virus researcher summitDEK: Researchers will reveal new details about the Stuxnet Virus at the Annual Virus Bulletin Conference in Vancouver this week.

Attacks On MPAA’s UK Law Firm Lead to Data Leaks, Lawsuit

A UK Law firm that has aggressively pursued cases against illegal file sharing on behalf of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) now finds itself in the cross hairs of both hackers and and privacy activists. 


Another week, another fast-moving Twitter attack. Just days after engineers stamped out a nasty cross site scripting hole in the company’s Web page, the company had to contend with a worm that used an attack called “cross site request forgery” to post salacious messages and malicious links on victims’ accounts. 

HED: MyOpera found to host malwareBAK: The My Opera free Web hosting service is hosting malicious code, just the latest prominent hosting service to be gamed by malware distributors. Less than a month after Google’s Code hosting service was found to be hosting and serving malicious executables, a search of Opera Software’s My Opera free hosting service has also turned up malicious programs, according to a researcher at Kaspersky Lab. My Opera, a free online hosting service for users of the Opera Web browser, played host to a PHP based IRC botnet, according to a post by Dmitry Bestuzhev, a researcher at Kaspersky Lab. The bot appears to have originated in Brazil, based on an analysis of the code, though its not clear who posted it to the My Opera  hosting service or when, Bestuzhev said. In August, Web security firm zScaler found a number of malicious programs hosted on servers used to power Google Code, a free, Web based platform that provides tools and resources for developers who want  to work on projects related to Google’s various open source software. The company claimed that regular anti malware scans of its servers failed to spot the malicious programs, which included a malicious downloader programs, Trojan horses, backdoor programs and password stealing key logging programs that target massively multi player online games like World of Warcraft. In a blog post, Bestuzhev said that free hosting services are popular among criminals who are looking to upload and disseminate malicious programs. (http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/2303/Google_Mozilla_and_now_Opera_Whos_next) Hosting domains like fileave, ripway, rapidshare and 110mb are common dumping grounds for malicious programs, he wrote. The My Opera free Web hosting service is hosting malicious code, just the latest prominent hosting service to be gamed by malware distributors. 

Google is using automated warnings to alert users of its GMAIL messaging service about wide spread attempts to access personal mail accounts from Internet addresses in China. The warnings may indicate wholesale spying by the Chinese government a year after the Google Aurora attacks or simply random attacks. Victims include one leading privacy activist. 

Call it “Frankencookie:” a security researcher has released a tracking cookie that he claims is nearly impossible to remove. Dubbed “evercookie,” it is designed to raise awareness about the ease with which Web site operators can evade privacy tools designed to eliminate shield visitors’ privacy.