08/05/2008 by swordfish.

Almost 500,000 people have been caught out by a booby-trapped media file, says security firm McAfee.

The fake file poses as a music track, short video or movie and has been widely seeded on file-sharing networks to snare victims.

McAfee said the fake media file outbreak was the largest it had seen for about three years.

Those running the fake file get bombarded with pop-up ads and risk compromising the safety of their PC.

The fake file or trojan has been widely distributed on the eDonkey and Limewire file-sharing networks. The file has many names and is written in different languages to trick people into downloading it.

Here are some of the many file names that hope to get you hooked into downloading the malicious file:

• girls aloud st trinnians.mp3
• changing times earth wind .mp3
• heartbroken fast t2 ft jodie.mp3
• meet bambi in kings harem.mp3
• paralyized by you.mp3
• pull over levert.mp3

So watch out if you frequent file sharing networks!

Source: BBC Technology News

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06/05/2008 by swordfish.

Yahoo has penned a deal with McAfee to use its SiteAdvisor software to warn users about potentially dangerous websites.

The new security feature will place a red exclamation mark next to search links McAfee believes are involved with spam, phishing or the spread of malicious software.

SiteAdvisor has been available for some time as a browser plugin, but Yahoo says it has been working for almost a year to integrate the technology into its search results. As part of the integration, sites that are found to be automatically installing malicious code, or attempting to exploit browser vulnerabilities, will be completely dropped from search results.

Source: PC Pro

P.S. The QBS PC Help website has been checked by the McAfee SiteAdvisor and it didn’t find any significant problems!

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10/04/2008 by swordfish.

The number of viruses, worms and trojans in circulation has topped the one million mark.

The new high for malicious programs was revealed by security firm Symantec in the latest edition of its bi-annual Internet Security Threat Report.

The vast majority of these programs have been created in the last twelve months, said Symantec. The report notes: “almost two thirds of all malicious code threats currently detected were created during 2007.”

The vast majority of these viruses are aimed at PCs running Microsoft Windows and are variants of already existing malicious programs that have proved useful to hi-tech criminals in the past.

Source: BBC News

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24/01/2008 by swordfish.

Security researchers are warning of a new piece of malware targeting smartphones equipped with the SymbianOS.

SymbOS/Beselo is currently spreading through the wild in Asia, deceiving victims by posing as an image file.

The attack is launched via an MMS message in which the user is sent a file called either ‘beauty.jpg,’ ‘love.rm’ or ’sex.mp3′.

On being launched, the worm copies itself into the user’s memory card and sets itself to load on startup. The malware then attempts to send itself to every contact on the user’s phone. It also generates random numbers to send itself to and attempts to spread to any nearby device via Bluetooth.

Source: Yahoo News

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08/01/2008 by swordfish.

The latest figures from Irish hosting firm IE Internet show that 72 percent of all e-mail messages received by their clients in December were identified as spam, compared to just under 65 percent in November. The proportion of e-mails received with viruses attached also increased slightly between November and December, from 3.15 percent to 3.35 percent.

The figures showed that 26.75 percent of all spam originated from the US. France was second with 18.91 percent, followed by Japan (12.14 percent), the United Kingdom (7.52 percent) and Germany (5.82 percent).

Variants of the W32.Zafi virus made up just over 30 percent of all viruses received, with W32/Document-Maximus, W32/Netsky.BR and W32/Mytob.CQ also featuring in the top five.

Source: Yahoo News

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