Malware

The term cyberwar has become a catch-all used by politicians, talking heads and others to encompass just about any online threat, regardless of the attacker or the target. Among security professionals, however, the word has a specific connotation–an attack by one nation against another nation’s infrastructure. Aside from the semantic issues, one of the major challenges for government agencies and security teams dealing with his problem is attribution and recognizing what constitutes an actual act of cyberwar. Stuxnet, Flame and their cousins may qualify, but more discussion is needed to help define the terms of these new conflicts, experts say.

The security of social networks and the people who use them every day has become a serious concern for enterprises and consumers alike. Millions of people rely on networks such as Facebook and Twitter to communicate and connect with friends and colleagues and attacks against the networks themselves and the users on them undermines some of the trust people place in them. Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kaspersky Lab, recently answered questions on the security concerns surrounding social media and what people can do to protect themselves on these networks.

A new exploit has been found in the Cool Exploit Kit for a vulnerability in Java 7 Update 7 as well as older versions, a flaw that’s been patched by Oracle in Java 7 Update 9.

Ransomware pays. A lot. These extortion scams, in which infected computers are essentially locked down by malware and electronic payment is demanded for a supposed cure, can net the criminal behind the scam as much as $33,000 per day.

A new Trojan has been identified that has the capability of stealing images from infected computers, setting the stage for anything from identity theft to blackmail.

Hi, folks! 

For the last two weeks each and every fan of official Kaspersky Lab Facebook pages worldwide had the chance to ask our CEO, Eugene Kaspersky, anything at all (and we must say that some of our fans took this literally:)) Thank you for the hundreds of great questions! There’s nothing more valuable in this world for us than your feedback and ideas on how to proceed with our quest to Save the World in the most efficient way. We’ve selected the most interesting and edgy questions of yours and asked Eugene to answer them with his usual honesty.

Gh0st RAT has a new roommate. A new backdoor called ADDNEW has been discovered on machines infected with the Gh0st remote access Trojan, adding new distributed denial of service attack capabilities, as well as a feature that targets passwords and credentials stored on the Firefox browser.