Items tagged with Malware
There's been much talk about security on Android in recent months, and it seems likely that it's a subject we won't be dropping anytime soon. Recently, we discovered that Android is susceptible to simple email attachment attacks, and not long before that, Google detailed how it was keeping its Google Play store more...
Read more...
If your moral compass doesn't dissuade you from pirating games, maybe the prevalence of malware will. According to the latest research from AVG, game hacks and cracks almost always contain malicious code, as in more than 90 percent of the time, depending on where the downloads originate. In other words, for every 10 times you download a keygen...
Read more...
Talk about spring cleaning. According to techcrunch, citing “a company in the mobile app industry which has insight into changes like this”, some 60,000 apps were removed from the Google Play store in February. That’s a startling number, considering that the total number of apps in the Google Play store is around 700,000....
Read more...
It's clear that where security's concerned, Google is on top of things. The company has no desire to be compromised, or have its users compromised, and so it's doing a variety of things to make sure incidents are kept to a minimum. Last fall, we learned of Google's app scanner utility - included in Android 4.2+ -...
Read more...
As the world shifts to mobile, hackers are adapting their strategies. According to Kaspersky Labs, the security firm just discovered a successful campaign by unknown hackers to target malware at a group of Android phone users. The target: Tibetan activists. The Conference app is malware. Image credit: Forbes The key to getting the attack off...
Read more...
Is there a world record for number of software vulnerabilities exposed within the span of a single month? If so, I'm willing to bet that Oracle's Java is the clear winner. We've reported on many Java happenings over the past couple of months, and it doesn't look like the fun is going to end anytime soon. Security firm...
Read more...
In the immortal words of radiohead: “You do it to yourself...and that’s why it really hurts.” Security company Bit9 is surely feeling those words after being hacked late last week when attackers targeted computers within Bit9’s own network that weren’t protected by Bit9’s own...
Read more...
Forget the school bully who wants your kid’s lunch money: today’s 11-year-old wants your kid’s digital gold, and he’s writing malicious code to steal it. Feeling out of your league, yet? AVG recently took to the airwaves and the Internet to warn parents that kids are learning to code at an...
Read more...
Social butterflies beware, there's a brand new strain of the Facebook Token Hijacker malware going around, and it preys on victims who want to score a pair of free UGGs boots. What makes this malware "special" is that it's armed with improved obfuscation techniques to keep its dirty code hidden from anti-malware...
Read more...
The antivirus market is enormous, responsible for billions in revenue each year. That being the case, it'd be easy to believe that current offerings are quite good, but not so claims a report (PDF) by security company iMPERVA. This report states a couple of alarming facts, including one that shows that less than...
Read more...
In case you need yet another reminder not to go downloading Android apps willy-nilly, a developer was recently caught trying to spread malware by masquerading infected programs as legitimate software. This latest outbreak was relatively easy to spot for tech savvy users, as the dirty dupes were identifiable with the...
Read more...
If there's one thing you don't want to happen when you run a website, it's for Google to shun you. Or worse. Today, that "worse" bit happened to one of the web's largest hosts of image files, used extensively on websites and social media. TwitPic, for some odd reason, was picked up in the latest Google sweep of...
Read more...
Software vulnerabilities will be the main target of cyber criminals in 2013, according to research by Panda Security's malware laboratory, PandaLabs. Java and Adobe in particular will prove points of emphasis for both cyber criminals and intelligence agencies in countries around the world. "In 2012, we saw how Java...
Read more...
On Friday, security firm Symantec discovered a Trojan called Backdoor.Makadocs, which in typical backdoor Trojan fashion accesses a compromised system and attempts to swipe data from it. The interesting bit is that it uses Google Docs as a proxy server to get around firewalls and connect to a C&C server, instead of attempting to connect...
Read more...
Windows 8 isn't without controversy, in that Microsoft designed the operating system to offer a unified experience between touch-friendly mobile devices and desktops that may or may not be equipped to handle touch input. But should we also be concerned about security? That depends on your perspective. On one hand, a new study by security firm...
Read more...
A new report by network security provider Kindsight suggests that 13 percent of all home networks in North America are infected with malware, which is slightly less than the infection rate of the previous quarter (14 percent). That works out to one in seven home networks. In addition, some 6.5 percent of broadband...
Read more...
Security outfit Avast Software has partnered with Facebook to share its Virus Lab data with the social networking service. In doing so, Facebook now has access to Avast's real-time cloud database, which it will use to block malware from being shared unwittingly by its users. When you click on a link within Facebook...
Read more...
Google Play is about to become a safer place to download apps. It sounds weird to say that after all this time, but it's not terribly uncommon to find malware laying in wait -- just ask the 80,000+ users who downloaded a fake copy of Bad Piggies. With the latest update to Google Play, it's been discovered that Google has introduced a built-in...
Read more...
Over 82,000 Google Chrome users were duped into installing a malicious browser plug-in from the Chrome web store when what they thought they were downloading was a free copy of Bad Piggies, Rovio's latest title in the Angry Birds franchise. How could such a thing happen? A search in the Google Chrome web store for "Bad Piggies" turns up a...
Read more...
Tread carefully on the Internet, surf ninja. That's always sound advice, but it's especially important now to be extra cautious, particularly if you use Java. Researchers at Security Explorations discovered a zero-day exploit in multiple versions of Java that could affect over a billion PCs around the globe. Technical details of the exploit...
Read more...
Well here's a bit of a bummer going into the weekend. Apparently the developer responsible for the popular Black Hole exploit kit -- the one that lazy hackers and inexperienced script kiddies are particularly drawn towards -- has released a new version of his nefarious software, with new and improved features designed to evade antivirus scanners....
Read more...
Malware targeting Android users is on a precipitous rise, and what's even scarier is that over half of all Android devices have unpatched vulnerabilities. That's according to Duo Security, a startup with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Duo Security issued its revelation after...
Read more...
