Computer Security Articles

Ah, Kate. When she isn’t waving at babies, mingling with the commoners or appearing on Tumblrs she likes to set down some thoughts on her blog located at katemiddleton997(dot)typepad(dot)com:


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She also wants you to check out her movie clip. Unfortunately, this movie clip can’t be viewed unless you update your version of Flash. Alarm bells ringing yet?


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I’m not entirely convinced legit installs of Adobe Flash Player come from pornmovie(dot)cz(dot)cc, but in the mad dash to see some rich people larking about with money you’ll actually end up with AntiVirus AntiSpyware 2011 on your computer:


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Reports that every tenth install come with a Wills & Kate towel set are unconfirmed, but you definitely don’t want to commemorate the wedding with a Fake AV program.

Christopher Boyd (Thanks Patrick)

Apologies to our readers from me and from Chester Wisniewski – we haven’t written anything for Naked Security for the past week or so.

That’s because we’ve been off the air, and on our feet, for the past few days, attending the RSA 2011 conference in San Francisco.

Actually, we haven’t been attending the conference. We’ve been on the Sophos booth at the RSA Expo which happens alongside the conference – and mere exhibitors aren’t allowed into the conference sessions. Not that we’d have been able to attend anyway, because the booth has been really busy.

Chester and I have been giving presentations on a regular and frequent basis: a Live Malware Attack from me, showing how JavaScript-borne malware sneaks into your network, and The Money Behind the Malware from Chester, explaining why cybercrooks put so much effort into their criminal activities.

The presentations were a big hit – some kind participants even went so far as to say they’d enjoyed them more than the papers they’d heard in the conference proper! – and gathered big crowds.

In fact, we heard through the grapevine that we may have been too successful, overflowing our booth into the aisles. (Apparently, it’s also dangerous to throw T-shirts to the audience lest the sharp edges cause injury. Sorry about that.)

But the really great moment came yesterday evening, when Chester and I went to the RSA 2011 Security Bloggers meetup. We’d been shortlisted for two awards; we were both surprised and delighted to walk away as the Most Educational Security Blog for 2011.

Of course, a large part of our ability to be educational on Naked Security is down to you, our readers.

We receive an astonishing range of suggestions, corrections, updates, alerts and useful advice via the Naked Security email address tips@sophos.com.

We really value your comments – thanks, and keep them coming!

Oh, and please take a listen to this week’s Sophos Security Chet Chat – Chester’s excellent weekly podcast, now in its 48th week – which was recorded live on the show floor at RSA. Share with us in some of the weirder and more wonderful aspects of the event.

Today we were happy to find out that our blog is a finalist for Best Corporate Security Blog in the 2011 SC Magazine Social Media Awards. You can vote for us, as well as your favorite security bloggers, here. Look for the “Second Annual SC Social Media Awards Voting” headline.

If you like our updates and threat research, we'd sure appreciate your vote. Voting ends on Friday, February 8, 2011. Thank you for the nomination and for considering us when you vote!

To help spread the message, you can click here to Tweet: I voted for @websenselabs in the 2011 @scmagazine Social Media Awards. Cast your vote here: http://www.scmagazineus.com/

A new version of the Android Market has just been launched, making it possible for every device owner to look for applications, buy or even remotely install apps to an Android device directly from the browser on a desktop computer.

Full story: Securelist / All Updates

In January we published the first of our malware wallpaper calendars. Here’s the latest wallpaper.

Full story: Securelist / All Updates

A short summary from the IT-Security for the Next Generation conference in Erfurt

Full story: Securelist / All Updates

Kaspersky Security Network is an integral part of Kaspersky Lab technology. With its ‘cloud’ architecture KSN automatically detects and blocks unknown malware and infected/dangerous websites, filters spam, protects children from unwanted content and lots more

Full story: Securelist / All Updates

TV Series such as “The Simpsons” are hugely popular and have hundreds of thousands of fans around the world. Unlike “Southpark” – another hugely popular series – not all of them are freely available on the web though. As such, there is a high demand on the web for such episodes and as usually happens, scam tactics appear around them.

Full story: Securelist / All Updates

ICQ client used to push malicious ads that lead fake anti-virus.

Full story: Securelist / All Updates

A new Twitter worm is spreading fast, using the “goo.gl” URL shortening service to distribute malicious links

Full story: Securelist / All Updates

The criminals seem to have enough stolen information like credit card PINs, as well as details for online banking accounts and payment systems. Their problem now is how to launder the money they have made.
Our statistics confirm it.

Full story: Securelist / All Updates

Mistyping leads to infections

Full story: Securelist / All Updates

What happens when all of your personal data is readily available for use by a cybercriminal?

Full story: Securelist / All Updates

Last week I got the chance to drop by the IIT campus in Mumbai, India, for the Techfest 2011 conference.

This was a great opportunity to meet some of the world’s brightest students and to listen to some very interesting lectures from people such as Richard Stallman – who needs no introduction, William Baker – the structural engineer for the famous Burj Khalifa, KS Pua – the inventor of the pen drive, or Jaap Haartsen, the engineer who developed the Bluetooth specification.

Full story: Securelist / All Updates

This new worm is propagating via e-mail with a backboned administration through a crimeware pack called BOMBA. The scam messages come with a message to a fake eCard requiring installing Flash Player (an old scammers trick).

Full story: Securelist / All Updates

A new year has broken – a new peer-to-peer botnet is on the rise.

Full story: Securelist / All Updates

Since Monday, my colleagues and I have been attending the annual Chaos Communication Congress 27C3 in Berlin. For the past 27 years, the Chaos Computer Club has organised this four day conference for hackers from all over the world.

Full story: Securelist / All Updates

We’d like to wish all our readers a very happy New Year and offer you a small gift – a selection of wallpaper calendars with the dates of the most significant events in the history of the IT security industry.

Full story: Securelist / All Updates

Modern game consoles are not only dedicated to gaming anymore, they rather offer a great variety of entertainment and many methods to support the whole gaming experience by offering platforms to meet other gamers from around the globe, share thoughts via private messages and status updates, a fully fledged browser to surf the web, media server capabilities and even online stores to buy games and additional game content via credit cards and gift coupons, which can be bought at shops if you’re not having a credit card.

Full story: Securelist / All Updates

n the last few days we have discovered that spam messages with malicious links are being sent via instant messenger services – on Securelist / All Updates

The use of all kind of services in a cloud basis is becoming more and more popular, enhancing productivity and reducing the needs of setting up a complex infrastructure. This approach is progressively being taken by IT industry. However, malware reacted faster in abusing this virtual infrastructure for its profit. – on Securelist / All Updates

Kaspersky Lab’s senior anti-malware researcher Kurt Baumgartner discusses the use of ROP (return-oriented programming) techniques in vulnerability exploit packs. – on Securelist / All Updates

It’s quite common to see attackers use hot topics on social networks to force users to click on malicious links. So what would be more interesting these days than using the term “Wikileaks”? – on Securelist / All Updates

We’ve begun to change the look of the GFI Labs (formerly Sunbelt) blog and we thought we’d give our alert readers some idea of what to expect.

Last June Sunbelt Software was purchased by GFI Software and today we changed the logo on top of the blog to reflect that:

Over the next month or so there will be more changes too.
Dr. Newton here will be part of the new “labs” look. He was brought to life by the creative team in the GFI marketing group in our sunny Mediterranean island headquarters on Malta.

Stephen Chetcuti Bonavita, GFI director of marketing said: “Just wanted to give you all a quick update on progress of the new GFI LABS. The webpages are still in progress and being improved constantly, though there’s still some work to be done.

“We did complete our creatives for the mad scientist character that we will use to represent the LABS and respective sections – we’re calling him Dr.Newton (wonder where that came from? ).”

Tom Kelchner

– on Sunbelt Blog