An investigation by the Swiss police uncovered child pornography had been downloaded from a Swiss hip-hop music website to around 2,300 computers in 78 countries. It was announced today that apparently the videos of minors engaged in sexual acts were hidden in the Swiss site where the principal content was defined as “perfectly legal.” See Read more…
Tags: Consumer, Family Safety
Last year my son was using the computer during his “allotted time” when I noticed something strange…he got up and walked away from the computer! I joke, but this really was strange behavior for him (because he is usually glued to it). So I asked him if he was okay. He said he was fine, Read more…
Tags: Cyber Security Mom, Family Safety
A few days ago I got a chance to look at a recent variant of the DNSChanger.ad. It drops a common rootkit that is mostly associated with FakeAlert and DNSChanger Trojans. Over a period of time the dropped sys file names have changed from tdss*.sys to seneka*.sys to skynet*.sys and so on. Our memory detection Read more…
The announcement of Michael Jackson’s death has caused immediate effects on the Web 2.0 world. The impact ranged from the interruption on Facebook of coverage of Farrah Fawcett’s death to a surge experienced by Twitter. The Web 2.0 world is definitely abuzz with traffic regarding his passing. Within hours the percentage of “long-tail” URL traffic associated Read more…
We all seem to take for granted that changes happen very quickly in the online world, yet for some reason we haven’t updated our definition of “defense in depth” in over a decade. Originally borrowed from military lingo, in information security defense in depth represents the use of multiple computer security techniques to help mitigate Read more…
Today is a sad day. I was a teenager in the eighties and grew up with Michael Jackson’s music blasting everywhere, it was a shock to hear about his untimely death. Quickly brought back into reality, McAfee Avert Labs colleague Guilherme Venere posted a very timely warning that it won’t be long before cybercriminals will Read more…
Tags: Cybercrime, michael jackson
Another typical notification of data loss by an educational establishment. In summary, the personal details of around 45,000 current and former students and staff were lost when the laptop containing them was stolen. datalossdb.org entry / Cornell University Entry Cornell have been very open with the facts of the matter, their site talks about what Read more…
Tags: data breach, Data Protection
With the current news about the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, it’s a good idea to remind our readers to beware of blackhat attempts to distribute malware to anyone looking for news. Â Every time a disaster happens or news about some celebrity reaches the media, malware writers try to take advantage of Read more…
With the advent of Web 2.0, social networking websites have become an easy target for online fraud and other identity scams. Lately, we have seen Twitter being used to phish out personal information, as well as MySpace scams and Facebook spams. With more than 15 percent of the traffic from India, Orkut is perhaps the Read more…
Recently, my colleague Pedro Bueno wrote about “dumb” malware authors hardcoding their login credentials into their password-stealing Trojan. The malware he referenced, PWS-Banker.gen.i, ostensibly came from Brazil. Today, we found the same negligence in a similar piece of Chinese malware detected as PWS-Banker.gen.de. When run, the password-stealing Trojan queries for the infected host’s IP address using three web-based IP address-lookup Read more…