Internet Fraud doesn’t Get the Attention

PhishingPhishing, Malware and Viruses costs consumers $7.1 billion in 2007. But its a concern of many that most internet fraud is not prosecuted by US government. Even though loss by internet fraud is increased by $2 billion from the previous year,U.S. federal and state law enforcement authorities are doing little to resolve what has become a multi-billion-dollar problem. Phishing is an attempt to steal your personal data in the form of fraudulent e-mail or website claiming to be legitimate seeking identifiable information.

Google Gadgets can be a Security Threat

google.pngWhen its come to online security there is one more thing you need to worry about. Google Gadgets!. According to SecTheory a security consultancy firm,Google gadgets can be forcibly installed and can be used to phishing purposes. The potential impact of these attacks is through cookie theft, or theft of confidential and sensitive information from the Gadget or user. Its also revealed by the firm that a malicious webpage can add a Gadget to a user’s iGoogle homepage without his knowledge and assist in the spread of gadget-based malware. Google gadgets are miniature objects that offer useful and dynamic content which can be placed in personalized Google homepages. Its not known whether these kind of attacks can be prevented by Anti virus programs.

Malware “court jester” attacks Facebook

Court JesterIT security and control firm Sophos has warned users of Facebook to exercise care, following an attempt by hackers to infect computers by spreading messages containing malicious links on the popular social networking website. The recent attack comes in the form of Wall Messages left on Facebook users’ to view a video, but clicking on the link takes users to a site which urges them to download a file to watch the movie. Sophos says it detects the executable file as the Troj/Dloadr-BPL Trojan horse, which in turn downloads further malicious code (detected as Troj/Agent-HJX), and displays an innocent image of a court jester sticking his tongue out.

Blogspot No:1 host of Malware

BlogSpotBlogspot, owned by Google, alone accounting for nearly 2 percent of all malware hosts,says Sophos a leading anti virus vendor. According to Sophos every 5 seconds one web page with malware is being detected. Sophos finds just over 16,000 malicious pages each day, mostly the result of malicious SQL-injection attacks on legitimate websites. Sophos is a UK based company mainly focuses on the business market unlike other security companies.

Turn a Computer Program into a Virus

Virus CreatorPanda labs, a division of Panda Antivirus has detected an application which can turn an executable file into a worm, giving it the capacity to spread itself. This eye-catching tool is very easy to use and can be used to customize further the virus it creates. The tool has advanced options to disable operating system components such as the Task Manager, or the Windows Registry Editor. It also has language options English, Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan.

Problems with Yahoo mails?

YahooIF you are getting ‘Server busy’ or ‘Time out’ error messages when access your Yahoo mail, rest assured Yahoo is busy fixing the problems. Yahoo has decided to roll back the anti-spam and SSL features,that were added in its mail service earlier, since those security and anti-spam enhancements interfered with users’ ability to retrieve POP e-mail from external accounts. The rollback of the anti-spam features is under way and will take few days according to Yahoo. After Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s acquisition offer, it is facing a tough shareholder proxy fight to oust current board members.

23% home computers infected

Computer VirusA study conducted by Panda Anti virus revealed that 23% of the home computers which have up to date anti virus software were infected by malware. When it comes to corporate computers this figure increases to 73%. Survey was conducted among 1.5 million users. Panda Security developed a system called “Collective intelligence” to over come the threat. This security model based on the collection of information concerning malware from the Internet community and the automated processing of this data in new data centers.