Items tagged with Malware
Go ahead and cue up Cartman's "No kitty, that's a bad kitty!" soundbite, only this time it's not in reference to stealing those delicious Cheesy Poofs. McAfee's mobile malware research division found a sample of ransomware for Android that it's calling "ElGato," and once infected, it can steal a user's SMS messages...
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With Nintendo's latest game - a mobile one, at that - the company has proven that there is still a lot of innovating to do in the market. While Pokemon GO is based on another title, Ingress, any game is going to have a greater chance of success when it features one of the most popular franchises ever. GO isn't just...
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It has been suggested that the microprocessors we use each and every day could pack in a bit more than we bargained for; namely, the tools needed for spying or undetectable access. And unfortunately, according to security researcher and developer Damien Zammit, there's a potential reason to be concerned over the "ME"...
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If you've ever tried to link someone to a Google Maps URL, you'll undoubtedly understand the benefit of URL shorteners. With them, we can take grossly long URLs and shorten them to a mere fraction of their original length, allowing your Facebook status update to retain a clean look and actually put a few words...
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Thought the Stagefright saga was all behind us? Think again. In a new paper published by Israel's NorthBit, we're shown that Stagefright can still prove to be a serious threat to older devices, with some able to be cracked in as little as 20 seconds. If you're still toting around a Nexus 5, LG G3, HTC One, or Samsung...
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Over the past few years, ransomware has become an ever growing threat to enterprise and personal users alike. If you’re unfamiliar with ransomware, it’s a piece of malware that infects a system, usually encrypts a user’s personal data – like photos, office documents, PDFs and the like – and then forces the user to pay...
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A medical center located in Hollywood, California, paid hackers 40 bitcoins worth nearly $17,000 in U.S. currency to decrypt its files that were being held ransom. The ransom amount is far less than the $3.6 million that was being thrown around when news of the security breach went public, but is no less disheartening...
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Could you go a full day without using your PC? It might not be all that difficult on a casual basis, but for workers at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, they've had the challenge of servicing patients without the aid of any computer systems for over a week due to a malware outbreak and subsequent ransom...
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If you’d like to take a trip down memory lane to a simpler time when MS-DOS was still a big part of computing life and most Americans hadn’t begun to “surf the web”, the Internet Archive has put on a display a virtual museum of computer malware from the 80s and early 90s. But this isn’t just a “static” museum where...
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It seems certain that we've all managed to wind up on a website at some point in time that had misleading elements, such as fake download buttons. While piracy is going to be the first thing that springs to many minds when this kind of sketchiness is brought up, it's hardly exclusive to that area. Some websites that...
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Dozens of Starwood hotels around the country were hit with malware that enabled cyber thieves to access credit and debit card information from point of sale terminals. The malware affected a variety of locations on Starwood properties, including restaurants, gift shops, and other places where customers might have...
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Security firm Lookout has just revealed what could be one of the most hard-hitting pieces of malware to ever hit Android. It doesn't have an official name, except to be referred to as "trojanized adware", and right from the top, we can tell you that if you only stick to downloading apps through Google's Play Store...
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It's hard to argue that "Internet of Things" (IoT) devices can enrich our lives. From making it easier to moderate temperature in our homes to securing them, IoT is going to be a big part of our future. Unfortunately, that does lead to one problem: as more and more devices get rolled out, the inevitability is that...
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The researchers at Palo Alto Networks are working overtime thanks to plenty of new mobile exploits creeping up seemingly every day. Recently, the firm has been responsible for a couple of big stories revolving around Apple's iOS. Back in August, it found that over 225,000 Apple accounts were stolen from jailbroken...
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When we usually think of traditional computer viruses, we think of software that is meant to harm machines, turn them into mindless drones that do the bidding of their new master, or exploit the rightful owner’s personal data. However, Symantec recently shed some new light on a virus — first discovered in 2014 — that...
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Apple might have one of the most secure app stores on the planet, but as with all things secure, someone is bound to find a hole and waltz right on in. Such is the case with whomever modified Apple's official coding software Xcode to bundle malware with any app compiled with it. That sounds simple, but despite the...
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Ransomware is one of the most sickening types of malware out there, and one enterprising person (or group) has managed to take things to a new level: by bringing porn into it.
According to research firm Zscaler, this latest piece of malware is designed to sucker people into downloading a dedicated porn player...
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If you take the plunge to root (or "jailbreak") a mobile device, it enters you into a world where software exists that wants nothing more than to ruin your day. Or perhaps even your device.
On the Android side, malware has popped up on occasion, but iOS has seemingly been relatively safe. But an exception has just...
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Whenever a chip maker comes out with a new processor or System-on-Chip (SoC) design, the first thing everyone wants to know is how fast it is. Clockspeeds and benchmarks underscoring raw compute power draw the most attention, though there's more to a processor than speed alone. For example, Qualcomm today revealed...
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Kaspersky Lab is defending itself against accusations that it tricked competing antivirus services into damaging their clients’ computers. The Russian anti-malware software developer is well-known for its security software, but faces stiff competition from the likes of Avast, AVG, McAfee, Microsoft and Symantec...
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Adobe's Flash platform is running out of friends. You may recall that a few weeks ago Mozilla disabled Flash by default in its Firefox browser due to the discovery of multiple critical vulnerabilities, and around the same time, Facebook's chief security officer urged Adobe to set a kill date for its buggy API. Expect...
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Windows 10 is off to a blazing fast start. The last official count had Windows 10 installed on more than 14 million devices in its first 24 hours, and unofficially there are now more than 67 million PCs and hybrids running the new OS. So naturally the bad guys are looking to capitalize on the situation, which they're...
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