Malware

Rogue antivirus applications have been a serious threat to users for some time now, but the level of sophistication of these attacks has gone up several levels recently, as attackers have learned to copy exactly the GUI and virtually every feature of authentic AV programs.

Security researchers believe changes being made by the Chinese government to the DNS process could help limit the number of malicious sites using the .cn top-level domain. Read the full article. [eWEEK]

Web servers, FTP servers, and even SSL servers
are becoming prime targets for botnet operators, not as command and
control servers or as pure zombies, but more as a place to host their
malicious code and files, or in some cases to execute high-powered spam
runs. Read the full article. [Dark Reading]

Here’s a quick update to the Adobe PDF Reader/Acrobat zero-day story that broke yesterday after the company confirmed that an unpatched vulnerabilities was being attacked in the wild.First up, an exploit has been fitted into the Metasploit point-and-click penetration testing tool and there are predictions that exploit code will be widely available within a day or two.

ISPs in Russia and Ukraine are home to some of the highest concentrations of customers whose machines are infected with the Conficker worm, shows data from the Shadowserver Foundation. Read the full article. [Washington Post]

Mark Weatherford, CISO for California, and Dan Kaminsky, finder of last year’s DNS flaw, offer five security predictions for 2010. Read the full article. [CSO]

On Tuesday, clicking on the illustration on Google’s front page commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Esperanto’s creator L. L. Zamenhof, generated an awful lot of malicious search results — taking visitors to dodgy advertisements or pages that tried to trick visitors into thinking their computers were infected and paying for fake antivirus software. Read the full article. [Computerworld]