Click here to view the embedded video.

President Obama explains how the growth of digital networks has increased the need to invest in online security, as well as steps individuals can take to protect themselves from online threats. October 14, 2009. (Public Domain)

Related posts:

1. Paypal SCAM (phishing-attack) In Action (Video)
2. Conficker and April 1st: What’s all the fuss about? (Video)
3. Case Conficker ( Know More About Conficker,Downadup,Downup and Kido Worm ) (Video)

A very resilient hoax is making the rounds on Twitter and Facebook. It consists of a message that poses as an AMBER Alert about a 3-year-old kidnapped boy. The message further claims the boy has been kidnapped in a Mitsubishi Eclipse with the registration plate “98B351“, and many users have fallen for it, spreading it further via Facebook, Twitter, and SMS.

According to IT security company Sophos, the message is nothing more than a hoax, but the said license plate number is already ranking high among the most commonly searched terms on the internet, which means the hoax is working. Don’t fall for it!

A quick search on the reveals there are currently no active AMBER Alerts. Interestingly, this hoax has been making the rounds for several weeks, but – as hoaxes often do – it seems to now be resurfacing stronger than ever. An AMBER Alert is a child abduction alert issued upon the suspected abduction of a child; the best way to check if it’s real is to go straight to National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children’s website.

by Stan Schroeder from mashable.com

Related posts:

1. Take Easy Backup Your Facebook, Twitter & Gmail
2. Facebook Fan Check Virus scare leads to malware
3. Facebook Applications Used For Phishing

Eight of the critical patches, addressing vulnerabilities in Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Silverlight, SQL Server, Forefront, Visual Studio, and other products, aim to stop hackers dead in their tracks from launching malicious attacks remotely.

A further five of the patches are classified as “important.”

In total, 34 security holes are fixed in what is Microsoft’s largest ever bundle of Patch Tuesday security updates.

Microsoft’s security response center has also released a chart, showing the severity of each vulnerability. “Red” means “critical” – in other words, that’s as bad as thing gets.

So the amount of “red” you see below should be a good indication of how serious these vulnerabilities are. If any more underlining of the importance were necessary, bear in mind that functioning code which exploits some of the vulnerabilities addressed by Microsoft’s patches has already been published.

You can learn much more about the patches in an advisory posted on Microsoft’s website.

Meanwhile, Adobe has also issued advice regarding critical vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat. Unlike the patches released by Microsoft, Adobe’s fixes cover Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and Unix/Linux.

In total, the Adobe fixes patch a stonking 29 vulnerabilities. Sophos has already seen malware which exploits some of the vulnerabilities affecting the Adobe PDF file format.

Over on his blog, Chet has some interesting things to say about these latest patches – looking in greater detail at some of the vulnerabilities, and questioning whether Adobe could learn a thing or two from Microsoft when it comes to responding to flaws in their code.

Whether you agree with Chet or not, one thing is clear – if you’re an affected Microsoft or Adobe user, you need to roll these patches out as a matter of priority.

by Graham Cluley, Sophos

Related posts:

1. Microsoft IIS web server under attack from hackers
2. Cracked Windows – Microsoft warns of critical flaw
3. Firefox to alert users about out-of-date Adobe Flash

• Activation – performed online via graphic user interface
• Archive Scaning – variable in-depth scanning of archives
• Heuristics – pioneering proactive protection for
  mobile platforms
• Logs and Statistics – provides information about scanning tasks and virus signature database status as well as a report on scanning history
• On-Access Scanning – scans newly-created and opened files; scanning of files received via Bluetooth, IR and Wi-Fi
• On-Demand Scanning – scans running processes and storage (including specific subfolders); standardized logs
• Quarantine – infected objects can be deleted or moved to a quarantine folder; once in quarantine, objects can be deleted or restored
• Updates – updates can be performed automatically on a daily (default), weekly or monthly schedule, or performed manaually by the user on an on-demand basis
• User Interface – friendly, easy-to-use user interface

ESET’s Mobile Antivirus is compatible with Symbian S60 3rd Edition, both Feature Pack 1 and Feature Pack 2, and on smartphones powered by Symbian S60 5th Edition. It requires 1MB of free memory to run on a Symbian OS-powered handset.

This release is the first ever release on ESET’s part. ESET Mobile Antivirus is still in the beta-testing stage, just to inform all readers out there.

Download the free ESET Mobile Antivirus for Symbian OS by clicking this download link.

For instructions on how to use the Mobile Antivirus on the OS, you can download the user manual in PDF format.

Source: http://softgeeek.blogspot.com

Related posts:

1. ClamWin Free Antivirus 0.95.1 Released
2. Free Windows Diagnostic Tool (ESET SysInspector)
3. Free Cloud Antivirus 0.08.81 Beta2 from Panda

Related posts:

1. Get Free AVG AntiVirus Small Business Edition
2. Twitter Using Google Blacklist To Filter Malicious Links
3. TrendProtect™ Version 1.2 FREE browser plug-in (IE Only)

Folks can now help us conquer spam by calling our attention to a profile they find questionable. Click the “Report as spam” button under the Actions section of a profile’s sidebar and our Trust and Safety team will check it out to see what needs to be done. No automated action will be taken as a result of reporting a user as spam (in other words, it can’t be used to incite an angry mob against an account you don’t like.) And once you report a profile it will automatically be blocked from following or replying to you. You nailed it!

Our spam fighting tools will continue to evolve as new behaviors emerge, and as always, we’ll keep trust and safety at the top of our list.

by  jennadawn from Twitter

Related posts:

1. Was Twitter denial-of-service targeting anti-Russian blogger?
2. Twitter Filters Tweets
3. Latest Britney Spears Twitter Hack Highlights TwitPic Weakness (Britney Spears isn’t dead)

- Magania trojan Sets the drive to autoplay by creating autorun.inf file in its root directory. If the drive is shared across the network then other remote computers can be infected any time they try to access this share.

- Downloads/requests other files from Internet.

- Creates a startup registry entry.

Severity Level : 9/10

Alias:

• Mal/EncPk-JS [Sophos]
• Trojan-GameThief.Win32.Magania.???? [Kaspersky Lab]
• Heuristic.LooksLike.Win32.SuspiciousPE.? [McAfee-GW-Edition]
• Trojan-GameThief.Win32.Magania.???? [F-Secure]
• TR/Crypt.ZPACK.Gen [AntiVir]
• Generic Worm [Panda]
• Worm:Win32/Taterf.? [Microsoft]
• Trojan.Win32.Inhoo [Ikarus]

Download the Removal tool for All Types of Magania (W32_Gammima,Trojan-GameThief,Taterf,Win32.Inhoo)  that provided by virusexperts.org,  you can download it from Here.

Related posts:

1. Removal tool for Magania.bzmw (Taterf.B,Win32.Inhoo) Trojan
2. How to Remove olhrwef.exe (Magania Trojan / Worm) Manually
3. How To Remove Win32/Mabezat, Win32/Mabezat.A, Win32/Mabezat.B, Worm.Win32.Mabezat.b

I was prompted into crafting this post by a Scientific American blog post which stated that many experts in various scientific studies are sometimes “blinded” by — in fact — their focused studies of a particular subject, missing some of the finer aspects of the larger picture, so to speak.

This reminds me of the many of the various efforts over the course of the past five or so years to connect-the-dots on Eastern European cyber crime — something which I have spent a great deal of time and effort, with reasonable success — Trend Micro customers get protected as a direct byproduct of this research.

Of course, this leads me to the reason for this post — there are certainly “gray areas” of cyber crime where we have yet to identify. It’s an ongoing research project, so to speak, and realistically it is a never-ending quest.

This is where I provide kudos to Dmitry Samosseiko of Sophos, for his excellent paper he presented at Virus Bulletin 2009 in Geneva, entitled “The PARTNERKA – What Is It and Why Should You Care?” [.pdf]

We’ve also been closely following  these “parnterka” relationships, or affiliate programs, for several years — including “installs for cash”  or “pay-per-install” programs that Dancho Danchev has written about on many occasions, and several other “business network” relationships between several entities in Russian, The Ukraine, Estonia, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

The bottom line here is that there are very organized, sophisticated, and professional criminal organizations operating out of Eastern Europe, and Trend Micro researchers are very much engaged on this front.

It is a very shadowy, nefarious cyber crime landscape of fraud & theft, and is not always as it appears on the surface — it requires much digging, verifying, connecting-the-dots, and other research that requires may hours, days, and even months of research. There is much that we still don’t know, and that holds true for everyone trying to expose these criminal enterprises.

But we’re on it.

My threat research group does “Threat Intelligence X” and “Threat Intelligence Y”, where “X” is the operational threats that exist now, and 15 minutes from now. Threat Intelligence “Y” is what we can expect to see in 6 months, a year, two years, etc., on the threat landscape.

And all of the threat landscape that exists now (and 15 minutes from now) get represented in the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network, which provides our customers protection against threat from three threat vectors — e-mail, web, and malicious files themselves.

I’m very proud of our efforts here.

Paul Ferguson
Threat Research

Post from: TrendLabs | Malware Blog – by Trend Micro

keywords:digital underground download,freaks of the industry,digital humpty

Though it shares some characteristics with backdoor trojan other PE variants, it is considered more than the average file infector. For instance, security experts will have a harder time finding its malicious code by ensuring that affected files do not exhibit any obvious sign of infection.

The file infector infects .DLL, .EXE, .SCR, and .SYS files in the following folders:

• %Program Files%
• %Windows%

It uses a polymorphic-entry point obscuring (EPO)-cavity type of infection, which is capable of moving some of the host file’s codes to another location. The malware encrypts its signature in a different way every time it executes as well as the instructions for carrying out the encryption. It hides its entry point in order to avoid detection. Instead of taking control and carrying out its actions as soon as an application is used or run, it allows it to work correctly for a while before taking action.

The file infectors also connect to the following URLs to download encrypted files:

• http://{BLOCKED}huy.com/plugin/plugin.dat
• http://{BLOCKED}ios.com/stamm/stamm.dat

If that is not troublesome enough, it also copies and hides legitimate files in the %UserTemp% folder as {random HEX value}.tmp.

Trend Micro Smart Protection Network already protects product users from this file infector. Non-users, on the other hand, can use HouseCall to clean their infected systems.

Post from: TrendLabs | Malware Blog – by Trend Micro

keywords:infector,exe infector,infectors,blaster,win32,trojan,trojan information