Microsoft has a new way of determining the geolocation of systems infected with malware, and it had subtle but relevant effects on the 11th volume of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report. It’s a novel concept, instead of relying on an administrator-specified setting that anyone with hands and a mouse can change, they are now relying on IP addresses.
As Android market share has shot up in recent months, so has the volume of malware designed for the mobile platform. There’s been a whopping 472 percent increase in Android malware samples in the last three months alone, according to research from Juniper Networks.
F-Secure researchers claim that malware spreading via malicious PDF files is signed with a valid certificate stolen from the Government of Malaysia, in just the latest evidence that scammers are using gaps in the security of digital certificates to help spread malicious code.
The TDSS rootkit has proven to be more pliable and adaptable than a campaigning politician, and attackers have used it in various forms for the last three or four years for all sorts of different attacks. It shows up in drive-by downloads, targeted attacks and just about everything in between, and one of the newer jobs it’s been assigned is to deliver the DNSchanger Trojan.
As the analysis of the Duqu malware continues to evolve, the picture that’s emerging is becoming more and more intriguing. The latest bits of evidence uncovered show that not only do the attackers create custom files for each individual attack, there is evidence indicating that they might have been working on Duqu in some form since 2007.
The creators of banking trojan programs in Brazil are using sophisticated block ciphers to encrypt their malware, making detection by anti virus products more difficult.
The Hungarian research facility that helped discover Duqu, the much-blogged about Trojan, has now released an open-source toolkit that can be used to help detect traces and instances of the worm.
An indictment filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York charges seven individuals with a a global scheme to commit Internet advertising fraud. The scheme infected more than four million machines in over 100 countries with malware. It is believed to have netted the scammers more than $14 million in commissions from online advertisers.
Online criminals registered far fewer Web domains for use in phishing attacks in the first half of 2011, in what may signal a decrease in phishing scams, according to a global phishing survey released this month by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG).
A few months after the hysteria around Stuxnet had died down, officials in Iran announced in April that some sensitive systems in the government’s networks had been attacked by a new piece of malware, known then as Stars. It now appears that attack was, in fact, the first appearance of an early version of Duqu, the most recent in a line of sophisticated attack tools that experts say have been designed to take out specific targets in a variety of sensitive networks.
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