From Facebook, by Jeff Williams, Microsoft
When the Koobface worm hit Facebook users last year, the company’s security team scrambled to help affected users reset their accounts and avoid new infections. But the worm has continued to crop up periodically since then, and so the anti-malware team at Microsoft has been helping the Facebook technicians get a handle on the attack.
From Dark Reading, by Kelly Jackson Higgins
In the last couple of years, SQL injection attacks have become the favorite tactic of pentration testers, cyber criminals and script kiddies alike. But some researchers are taking the technique to a new level. At Black Hat Europe later this month, a British researcher will show off a tactic for using SQL injection to take control of the database behind the Web server.
From The Last Watchdog, by Byron Acohido
Lost amid all of the breathless reporting on Conficker’s update mechanism this week was the fact that machines infected with the latest version of the worm, Conficker.C, have effectively stopped previous versions of the worm from spreading.
By Elinor Mills, ZDNet News
There’s been lots of hype about the fact that the latest variant of the Conficker worm is set to start communicating with other computers on the Internet on April 1 – like an April Fool’s Day time bomb with some mysterious payload.
To help clear up some of the confusion about Conficker, here are answers to common questions [zdnet.com] people may have. Also see story about German researchers scoring a major breakthrough.
By Gregg Keizer, Computerworld
Cybercrooks have hit on a new twist to their aggressive marketing of fake security software, and are duping users into downloading a file utility [computerworld.com] that holds users’ data for ransom, security researchers warned today.
By Bradley Anstis, Marshal8e6
While search engine optimization (SEO) is becoming one of the must do’s for companies that are trying to improve theirsite ranking in search engines like Google and Yahoo, it’s also increasingly becoming a trick of the trade for spammers and malware authors looking to drive traffic to their own infected websites or websites they might have hacked with their malware.
Like any owner of a website, criminals are interested in directing as much traffic as possible to their pages in order to distribute content and increase potential profits. Of course, in their case, the content that they are pushing is malware that aims to use their unsuspecting victim’s computer to send spam, launch denial of service attacks or steal valuable information from other users, such as online banking passwords and credit card numbers. The financial goals are nothing new, but the technique shows the growing sophistication of the spammer and malware author community.
By Gregg Keizer, Computerworld
A recently released report claims that Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is more than twice as effective at blocking malware sites than its nearest rival.
A parade of security researchers spent the better part of Wednesday at the CanSecWest conference putting the lie to the notion that iPhones, Windows Mobile devices and other smartphones are not really targets for attackers.
By Bob McMillan, ComputerWorld
Diebold has released a security fix for its Opteva automated teller machines after cybercriminals apparently broke into the systems at one or more businesses in Russia and installed malicious software.
The Kido Worm Attack – Fri, Jan. 23 2009
Ryan and Roel discuss the propagation techniques behind the Kido/Conficker worm attack and make important recommendations around protection and mitigation.
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