Archive for the ‘Virus Alerts’ Category

A common Web programming error could give hackers a way to take over Google Buzz accounts, a security expert said Tuesday.

The flaw is a “medium-sized problem” with the Buzz for Mobile Web site, said Robert Hansen, CEO of SecTheory, who first reported the issue.

This type of Web programming error, called a cross-site scripting flaw, lets the attacker put his own scripting code into Web pages that belong to trusted Web sites such as Google.com. It is a fairly common flaw but one that can have major consequences when exploited on widely used Web sites.

Wow. Thank goodness Google is already working on a patch, right?

Tonight, I was reading about protein powders at www.proteinpowder.net because I heard they can help burn some of the fat as you are working out, but just the sheer thought of working out exhausted me so I took a break to read more news.

Remember my post two days ago, about virus makers?

In an effort to boost sales, sellers of a fake antivirus product known as Live PC Care are offering their victims live technical support.

According to researchers at Symantec, once users have installed the program, they see a screen, falsely informing them that their PC is infected with several types of malware. That’s typical of this type of program. What’s unusual, however, is the fact that the free trial version of Live PC Care includes a big yellow “online support” button.

Clicking on the button connects the victim with an agent, who will answer questions about the product via instant message.

It seems they too have found a way to make money at what they do.

I was doing some research tonight about alli weight loss and other ideas to keep myself as trim as I can be. After a couple hours I needed a break so I started looking at tech news, as usual. That’s when I was “introduced” to a nice new threat that’s out there waiting for me.

What’s worse? Taking over the world by writing viruses, or creating a company that survives because people write viruses?

Shares of McAfee Inc. jumped Friday after the maker of security software posted better-than-expected fourth-quarter revenue.

The company’s profit, meanwhile, met Wall Street’s expectations, and McAfee’s board approved a stock buyback program of up to $500 million.

Looking ahead, the company forecast a profit of 60 cents to 64 cents per share, excluding items, on revenue of $500 million to $520 million for the current quarter.

Honestly, I forgot McAfee even existed. Oops.

Cyber-criminals have started preying on Verizon Wireless customers, sending out spam e-mail messages that say their accounts are over the limit and offering them a “balance checker” program to review their payments.

The e-mail messages, which look like they come from Verizon Wireless, are fakes; the balance checker is actually a malicious Trojan horse program.

Have you ever noticed the great number of attacks which strike people with email, usually from their bank? I think the banks should reward customers who don’t click on those emails with cancun vacations or something similar.

What do you think?

No contest.

If you’ve been paying attention to general computer news, you may have read about the Conficker worm, and what may (or may not) happen to Windows PCs that are infected with Conficker on April 1. The worm has received a lot of attention, leading more than a few Mac users to ask about the worm’s impact on OS X. Mac security maker Intego received so many inquiries that the company added a Conficker entry to its blog.

So, as a Mac user, how worried should you be about Conficker? The short answer to the question is that, unless you’re running Windows inside a virtual machine or via Boot Camp, you really don’t have much to fear from Conficker. It’s a worm that takes advantage of Windows systems with unapplied security patches—a population that may be as high as 30 percent of the Windows machines out there. Conficker won’t work on OS X at all, so most Mac users have nothing to fear from the worm.

Our local news ran a story that made April 1 sound more scary than Y2K in 1999.

Worries that the notorious Conficker worm will somehow rise up and devastate the Internet on April 1 are misplaced, security experts said Friday.

Conficker is thought to have infected more than 10 million PCs worldwide, and researchers estimate that several million of these machines remain infected. If the criminals who created the network wanted to, they could use this network to launch a very powerful distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against other computers on the Internet.

Read the rest at Yahoo! Tech.

Ack!

The Center for Disease Control has issued a medical alert about a highly contagious, potentially dangerous virus that is transmitted orally, by hand, and even electronically.
This virus is called Weekly Overload Recreational Killer (WORK).
If you receive WORK from your boss, any of your colleagues or anyone else via any means whatsoever – DO NOT TOUCH IT!!! This virus will wipe out your private life entirely. If you should come into contact with WORK you should immediately leave the premises.

Take two good friends to the nearest liquor store and purchase one or both of the antidotes – Work Isolating Neutralizer Extract (WINE) and Bothersome Employer Elimination Rebooter (BEER). Take the antidote repeatedly until WORK has been completely eliminated from your system.

You should immediately forward this medical alert to five friends. If you do not have five friends, you have already been infected and WORK is controlling your life.

Of course this is important information, so take a moment after your next microdermabrasion to make sure you are not afflicted.

It seems like the hackers are trying to stay one step ahead.

Computers infected with the Conficker worm are being updated with a new variant that sidesteps an industry effort to sever the link between the worm and its hacker controllers, researchers at Symantec Corp. said Friday.

The new version, dubbed Conficker.c, represents the first set of “orders” that researchers have witnessed being sent to infected systems, said Vincent Weafer, vice president of Symantec Corp.’s security response group. The update shows that the hackers want to defend their collection of compromised PCs, Weafer argued.

They’ll trip soon enough.

A computer virus that may leave Microsoft Windows users vulnerable to digital hijacking is spreading through companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia, already infecting close to 9 million machines, according to a private online security firm.

Fortunately, however, it may be a dud.

…

F-Secure’s chief security adviser, Patrik Runald, said the virus’s coding suggests a type of bug that alerts computer users to bogus infections on their machines and offers to help by selling them antivirus software.

Instead, the virus is simply spreading to little effect, though it may still pose a threat to infected computers.

Make sure your anti-virus software is up to date.

It seems there is another security threat out there, just in time for Christmas.

Microsoft has confirmed the existence of a new and potentially serious security threat to users of its SQL Server database software.

“Microsoft is aware that exploit code has been published on the Internet for the vulnerability addressed by this advisory,” the company said in a bulletin published Monday.

The threat is essentially software code that hackers could use to access or alter corporate databases built with SQL Server. The malicious code could allow what’s known in IT security as remote code execution, a process by which hackers could, for instance, alter figures in a bank account without ever setting foot on the bank’s premises.

Thank goodness InformationWeek was there to put it all in plain English for us.