New banking trojans are hacking into online bank accounts. Unlike phishing attacks, which use e-mail scams to get you to type your login information at fake bank websites, the trojan programs are invisible and steal data many different ways. Banking trojans wait on your hard drive for a chance to get into your online banking accounts.

The programs can be gotten by clicking on a viral link to a greeting card or video through e-mail spam or by clicking to a website that has already been taken over by hackers. Usually banking trojans are unnoticed until the user logs on to a banking website and then it steals usernames and passwords.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 16:02

Everyone worries about the drunken photos of themselves posted on Facebook that could leak out to the wider world — whether it's to that cute guy or girl, your parents, or, worse yet, future employers.

But that isn't the half of it. Facebook has nothing on cell phones, which have become the most powerful weapon of privacy invasion ever.

With the appropriate use of cellular technology, parents can fence in their children, spouses can read their partners' text messages and the government can pinpoint a caller's location to within a few feet — all facts of which most people are unaware.

Consider those infamous little service bars. How else could those bars be extrapolated without constant communication with your carrier's nearest cellular antenna?

By triangulating the phone's position based on its communication with a number of the closest towers, the accuracy with which the carrier can determine the phone's location can be narrowed down to say, 50 meters. If the phone has GPS capabilities, the user's location can be pinpointed within a matter of feet.

The carriers have that information as a given. But the government can grab it quite easily.

A New York judge ruled in 2005 that the government could obtain a phone's tracking data without a warrant, as the user voluntarily chose to carry the phone and so implicitly allowed the transmission of tracking information.

With the right tools, your neurotic ex, overbearing parents or run-of-the-mill stalker can haunt you as well.

Some trackers are built into the service contract, as with Verizon's "Chaperone," which texts parents when their children leave parentally-designated boundaries. Or the tracking can be voluntarily enabled, as with the new service Google Latitude, which allows a user to transmit their phone's location to his approved friends.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 10:04

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) -- The city of Springfield has been hit with about $12,000 in costs to deal with the effects of a computer virus that hit this month.

Along with the $12,000 in costs, city employees have had to work several hundred hours of overtime to solve problems created by the bug that struck Feb. 2. The virus blocked city workers from accessing or sending data and kept the public from getting certain information.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 14:02

Attackers are making the rounds and exploiting a critical security flaw in Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9.

Earlier versions of the PDF-related software are also affected by the critical security flaw, which could cause the applications to crash and potentially let an attacker gain control of a person's computer, Adobe Systems warned Thursday.

Reports also surfaced that attackers have developed an exploit and are taking advantage of the flaw, the company said.

Adobe has yet to develop an update to address the vulnerability but noted it expects to have one ready for Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 by March 11. After that, the company expects to launch updates for the earlier versions of the software going back to Adobe Reader 7 and Acrobat 7.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 09:50