By Priyanka Joshi

It all starts with a casual visit to an innocent-looking (or naughty) website or a click on an alluring browser link. What the website does, in turn, is to track your every online move or (worse still) even download files from your system.

Result: You have fallen for a virus. You may recall names like Kamasutra, the World Cup virus, Feebs.Kd, W32.Frethren – all of which either have stolen email addresses from you (and emailed embarrassing stuff to others), overwritten files on your PC, slowed down your computer or simply erased your hard drive.

Posted by Spencer Cuffe in Virus & AntiVirus News at 08:50

by Will Sturgeon

McAfee and Symantec have thrown their considerable weight behind a larger campaign to rid eBay of illegal software sales

Two of the world's largest antivirus software vendors are launching legal action against software thieves selling illegal versions of well-known security products on eBay.

The sale of improperly licensed software on eBay is booming, according to various reports, but the auction site has taken the position that it is the role of software makers to protect their intellectual property.

McAfee and Symantec have thrown their considerable weight behind a larger Software & Information Industry Association campaign to rid eBay of illegal software sales. The SIIA is planning to ensnare criminals by buying software from eBay and suing those whose products turn out to be improperly licensed.

Posted by Spencer Cuffe in Virus & AntiVirus News at 08:44

By Gregg Keizer

Nearly one in five enterprises have had workers' PCs infected with keyloggers, the worst kind of spyware, a survey released Monday said.

The poll, conducted by Harris Interactive for San Diego-based security vendor Websense, found that 17 percent of IT administrators said that one or more employees had launched a keylogger on their network. In last year's survey, only 12 percent of administrators had acknowledged that keyloggers infected their domains.

Keyloggers are a type of spyware, and are used to record keystrokes (and sometimes mouse movements as well) to capture information such as usernames and passwords. They're often planted on consumers' PCs by identity thieves, but are becoming a corporate problem, too.

Posted by Spencer Cuffe in Virus & AntiVirus News at 09:08

By Dinah Greek

A man has been sentenced to jail for using spyware to gain unauthorised access to US government computers.

Kenneth Kwak, a 34-year-old system auditor who had been working on the computer security of the US Department of Education, admitted placing spyware software on his supervisor's PC.

Posted by Spencer Cuffe in Virus & AntiVirus News at 09:04