Michael Jackson Suicide Virus

Just days after the al-Qaida leader committing suicide trojan email, a spam email claiming that Michael Jackson has attempted suicide has been spreading across the Internet, according to Internet security firm Sophos.

E-mails with the fake news contain a Trojan horse that infects a system if a user clicks on a link to find out more about Michael Jackson's suicide.

The e-mail's subject line reads "Re: Suicidal Attempt" and the following message text: "Last night, while in his Neverland Ranch, Michael Jackson has made a suicidal attempt."

"If you click on the link, the Web site displays a message saying it is too busy, which may not surprise people who think it might contain genuine breaking news about Michael Jackson," said Carole Theriault, security consultant at Sophos.

Sophos has determined that the code downloaded onto PCs actually attempts to download another Trojan horse, identified as Troj/Borobt-Gen.

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Mobile Trojan Pretends As Anti-Virus Software

On Friday, June 10, 2005, anti-virus vendor F-Secure announced a variant of the Cabir worm aimed at Nokia smartphones pretends to be legitimate anti-virus software.

The Skulls.L trojan is a variant of the Skulls.C trojan except it masquerades as an illegally copied version of F-Secure's Mobile Anti-Virus program. The trojan is aimed at smartphones based on the Nokia Series 60 platform, which is based on the Symbian OS.

F-Secure said, "Skulls.L is a malicious SIS file trojan that replaces the system applications with non-function versions." Once installed, it places Symbian-specific versions of the Cabir worms on the phones and disables legitimate anti-virus programs, including those from F-Secure.

The Cabir virus activates only when users try to run the bogus programs and when the Skulls.L is activated, it will display a message saying: "F-Secure Antivirus protect you against the virus. And don`t forget to update this!".

F-Secure warned users to download its anti-virus files only from F-Secure servers and noted that the official files are signed so that the source can be verified.

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Beware Of Osama Bin Laden Trojan

A spam e-mail that attached pictures of a captured Osama bin Laden but carries a malicious trojan in the attachment has been spreading recently.

Millions of copies of various versions of the e-mail were mass-mailed on Thursday, June 2, 2005. All versions of the message announced that the al-Qaida leader had been seized and included an attachment called "pics" that, when opened, attempted to download a worm to the victim's PC. If the download is successful, the worm will attempt to start propagating by e-mailing itself to the names in the mailing list. It can also set the victim's computer up to be used as a relay for spam.

Part of one of the spam messages seen by F-Secure read: "Turn on your TV. Osama Bin Laden has been captured. While CNN has no pictures at this point of time, the military channel (PPV) released some pictures. I managed to capture a couple of these pictures off my TV. Ive attached a slideshow containing all the pictures I managed to capture."

Though the Osama bin Laden e-mail was widely spammed, neither McAfee nor F-Secure had seen many reports of the worm. That indicates that most people are identifying the suspicious spam or blocking it.

This is not the first time Osama bin Laden's name has been used in an attempt to trick users to open a malicious file. Last year, a message claiming to contain pictures of the al-Qaida leader committing suicide surfaced in Internet news groups. The supposed picture file launched a Trojan to hijack the user's PC.

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World's Largest Trojan Fraud Uncovered

Israeli police have uncovered a massive industrial spying ring that is alleged to have used Trojan software to snoop into some of the country’s leading companies.

The program appears to have been extremely effective at performing its function of stealing confidential documents from target companies, as well as monitoring activity on infected machines. Police are said to have gained access to a number of FTP servers based in the US and Israel and discovered a "tens of thousands" of documents pillaged by the malware from victim companies.

The fraud is believed to have used two quite simple methods of attack, both of which were able to bypass normal safeguards such as perimeter security or anti-virus programs. The first was to send a disc to a particular individual purporting to contain a business proposal, which when explored would load the Trojan on that person’s PC. Alternatively, the same process could be undertaken via email, and again it is likely that the personalised approach would catch recipients off guard.

The fraud only started to come to light some months ago after Israeli author Amnon Jacont complained that passages of a book he was writing had appeared on the Internet, despite never having left his PC. Subsequent investigations led police to believe that the Trojan written by London-based Michael Haephrati had been responsible, and so the whole fraud started to unravel. If it weren’t for this complaint the Trojan would still be out there, silently stealing information on a huge scale.

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McAfee Acquires Wireless Security Firm

McAfee announced on June 2, 2005, the acquisition of Wireless Security Corp, which is a privately held company that offers innovative Wi-Fi security solutions to protect home and small business wireless networks from unauthorized access to a wireless network, its contents, or Internet service.

Wireless Security offers subscription-based services that let customers connect computers securely to wireless networks at home or in offices through a remotely-managed authentication service.

"We believe there’s a tremendous market opportunity in the Wi-Fi space," said McAfee senior VP Bill Kerrigan, noting that many home wireless LAN users, as well as small to mid-sized businesses, find it hard to configure authentication and encryption security in their WLAN access points. McAfee envisions a managed service that would handle this for them remotely.

McAfee intends to integrate the Wireless Security software into its own security software as well as offer the WLAN security management software as a stand-alone product.

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The PC Security

Hi Everyone.

This blog is going to be a place to share all sorts of security issues happening in this IT world. News and information regarding computer security, online security, network security, wireless security, security applications and tips & tricks to secure your PC, will be discussed here.

Hope you all enjoy it. :)