Malware



Microsoft has released a beta version of a new tool that can help victims of malware attacks recover from ugly infections, even if they don’t have the ability to reach the Internet. The Windows Defender Offline tool enables users to clean their systems of malware from a CD or other removable media.

The controversy over stealthy monitoring software by CarrierIQ has raised important questions about user privacy and business ethics in the Brave New World of smart phones, tablets and the like. In the uproar over CarrierIQ’s surreptitious monitoring of mobile phone users, various tools have appeared that claim to be able to detect the software. However – removing CarrierIQ from your phone is another matter entirely. And,while some sites have offered instructions on doing so, Kaspersky Lab researcher Tim Armstrong said that, for all but a few mobile phone hardware experts, doing a CarrierIQ-pendectomy is a bad idea. 

The Black Hole exploit kit and the Carberp Trojan have a lovely, symbiotic relationship and they’ve recently decided to take that relationship to the next level. In the last month, there has a been a major spike in the volume of Carberp infections related to attacks from sites hosting Black Hole, mostly exploiting Java vulnerabilities.

Security researchers often use language and metaphors from the natural world to describe problems in the virtual world. (Thus, our use of the terms “virus,” and “worm.”) Now it turns out that the links may not be so arbitrary, after Microsoft researchers discovered that tools they developed to detect spammers’ efforts to avoid anti-spam filters were also great at spotting mutations in the HIV virus.