Further to our IE6/Aurora Coverage:

Targeted and sophisticated attacks against Google, Adobe, and Juniper used an unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer to breach computers. These incidents are receiving a lot of attention from the media much due to the size and notability of the companies affected. France, Germany and now Australia have issued guidelines and urged users to switch to other browsers until a patch is available from Microsoft. Others who "really" don't like Internet Explorer have gone as far as creating an obituary notice of Internet Explorer 6's death – www.ripie6.com

Posted by Greg Hewitt-Long in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 13:03

Further to our articles on the flaw in Internet Explorer, which lead both the German and the French governments to issue warnings to their citizens NOT to use the browser, Microsoft has announced that it will release a patch as early as tomorrow - 21st of January - far sooner than it's regular planned update would be rolled out.

Posted by Greg Hewitt-Long in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 14:23

It won’t come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog that there’s a lot of fake/rogue anti-malware about. However, a report released at RSA Europe goes some way towards quantifying that threat, and has created something of a stir in the media.

That’s to be expected: journalists tend to love facts and figures. Anti-malware researchers (well, this anti-malware researcher) have/has a tendency to be more cautious, and while the statistics in the report from Symantec certainly give a flavour of the sheer scale of the problem, they’re a snapshot taken from a particular viewpoint, not the whole panorama. (That said, a lot of resources seem to have been expended on this report: it’s probably not a million miles out.)

Unfortunately, some journalists have simply gone to the highlights page in the executive summary and recycled the figures (one newscast infuriated me by advising "don’t allow pop-ups" as if that was all there is to fixing the problem), whereas the really interesting and useful content is in the descriptions of the mechanisms behind these scams. We have an overview paper on the topic at http://www.eset.com/download/whitepapers/Free_but_Fake.pdf by ESET Latin-America’s Cristian Borghello, but for a more detailed approach, the much longer paper based on a longitudinal study is well worth looking at.

Posted by Greg Hewitt-Long in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 07:10

Haiti earthquake news & donation scams

Bad news are always good news for cybercriminals! The tsunamis, hurricane Katrina, Air France disaster, Michael Jackson's death were all abused in the past and now the Haiti earthquake is being used by them to exploit people's concern and compassion.



As people tend to search for info on the recent tragedy online, cybercriminals have been quick to post many websites claiming to have exclusive news or video footage of the Haiti earthquake, but in fact attempt to infect the visitor with malware, usually one that promotes rogue antimalware products (more on these here).

Posted by Greg Hewitt-Long in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 07:06