The FBI says that more than 2.5 million systems infected with the DNSChanger malware connected to DNS servers set up by the authorities in the week following a crackdown on a global criminal network dubbed Ghost Click.
A group of researchers is claiming that they’ve found a root exploit that enables them to jailbreak the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet made by Research In Motion. In a video demonstration of the jailbreak, one of the researchers shows off the ability to change the settings on a PlayBook and says that he also has the ability to install the Android Market app on the tablet.
Java has become virtually unavoidable in the last few years, and it’s installed on hundreds of millions of PCs around the world. A huge number of those installations are vulnerable versions of Java, and this fact has not escaped the attention of attackers, who have made the technology one of their favored targets. In fact, new data from Microsoft shows that Java exploits were the most prevalent in the first six months of 2011, and that attackers often use exploits for bugs that are several months or years old.
In the wake of a highly visible hack of its network infrastructure, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says that hackers from the group TeamP0ison compromised an unpatched server and that e-mail addresses and account passwords exposed in the attack were outdated.
Researchers have known for years that virus writers and attackers pay close attention to the analyses researchers do of their work, and it appears that the Duqu authors are no exception. Shortly after the first public reports about Duqu emerged in early autumn, the crew behind Duqu wiped out all of the command-and-control servers that had been in use up to that point, including some that had been used since 2009.
Columbia University researchers say tens of millions of printers may have flawed firmware that could allow hackers to remotely set fires, erase code and infiltrate computer networks, according to a report on MSNBC’s Red Tape Chronicles blog today.
The e-mail addresses and account passwords for more than one thousand United Nations staff and other users of a UN development Web site were leaked online by the hacking group TeamP0ison, which has been linked to past attacks on governments in the U.S. and India.
A new worm has popped up on Facebook, using apparently stolen user credentials to log in to victims’ accounts and then send out malicious links to their friends. The worm also downloads and installs a variety of malware on users’ machines, including a variant of the Zeus bot.
SMS Trojans that ride along on supposedly benign mobile apps and then send out messages to high-priced numbers have been a problem in some Asian and Eastern European countries for several years now, most notably in Russia and China. But now the attackers have realized that there’s a whole big world of users out there to target and have begun going after people in other countries with new strains of SMS malware.
Customers of the Lucky supermarket chain in California were feeling rather unlucky last week, after receiving notice from parent company Save Mart Supermarkets said that self-service checkout lines in 20 of its stores were found to have debit and credit card readers that had been outfitted with card skimmers.
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