Malware infections growing more deadly

Malware infections have tumbled by 60% over the last two years, yet their increasing sophistication has caused even greater problems for companies.

Two-thirds of organizations affected by malware said it was responsible for their most serious security breach of the year, resulting in them losing confidential data or acting as a spam relay.

Posted by Sean Cannon in Virus & AntiVirus News at 09:57

SAN FRANCISCO — An e-mail scam aimed squarely at the nation’s top executives is raising new alarms about the ease with which people and companies can be deceived by online criminals.

Thousands of high-ranking executives across the country have been receiving e-mail messages this week that appear to be official subpoenas from the United States District Court in San Diego. Each message includes the executive’s name, company and phone number, and commands the recipient to appear before a grand jury in a civil case.

A link embedded in the message purports to offer a copy of the entire subpoena. But a recipient who tries to view the document unwittingly downloads and installs software that secretly records keystrokes and sends the data to a remote computer over the Internet. This lets the criminals capture passwords and other personal or corporate information.

Posted by Sean Cannon in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 09:42