Personal Financial Information May Be At Risk, Linked Site Says

DENVER -- The online edition of the Rocky Mountain News post a virus warning Friday for people who visited RockyMountainNews.com last week.

The warning, carried on the main page of the site, said:

"If you visited RockyMountainNews.com between Saturday and Tuesday on a Windows computer without virus protection or have not updated your virus protection in the past two weeks, your computer might be infected with a virus."

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 17:02

A recent security advisory from a messaging security company warned that service providers are placing e-mail users at risk by continuing to ignore sophisticated virus propagation techniques. Attackers are moving beyond traditional tactics, such as sending messages with virus executables attached or virus-infected documents, to employing hybrid attacks that combine elements of both spam and viruses. In these attacks, malware authors embed links in informative or advertising e-mails. Recipients are enticed to follow these links to a Website that hosts the malware, which could be a virus, worm or Trojan.

These advanced threats embed anti-spam and anti-virus (AV) evasion techniques with the objective of eluding both spam and traditional AV filters. Most spam filters are not capable of catching these highly mutable threats because they do not follow the recurrent, mass e-mail tactics commonly found in spam. Likewise, conventional AV solutions bypass these messages as they appear to be spam or phishing. As these attacks become the norm, operators are urged to re-examine their anti-virus strategies and ensure that their messaging security processes are capable of detecting these hybrid threats.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 10:12