Web threats

It seems I’m not doing anything other than write about malware on Facebook, but here goes again

A host of events took place in the world of IT threats during the first quarter of 2011.

Latin America has ceased to be a neglected region for cyber-attacks and has since become a suitable area for the local development of crimeware for managing botnets.

Today while conducting research on the alleged Latvian power hack, I came across some interesting malvertising on imageshack, where pictures of the purported hack have been hosted.

Internationalized Domain Names already being used to spread malware, including the use of shortener URL services.

The bad guys were fast: Blackhat SEO campaign about Osama’s Bin Laden death spotted some minutes after the announcment.

It is a well-known fact that events of global interest are exploited by cybercriminals for financial gain. The current situation in Japan is no exception.

The Artro botnet has been around since early 2008. However, a full description of its functionality is still not available, so to rectify this, we decided to publish the results of a study we undertook.

Another botnet takedown, this time surrounding a piece of malware otherwise known as AFCORE or Coreflood, is being pursued by the US DOJ. According to the allegations, the malware infiltrated millions of systems.

I don’t have a LiveJournal account, but sometimes I’ll have a quick read of the blogs during breaks. On 4 April, however, an official announcement by LiveJournal Russia stated that the service had been subjected to a DDoS and was unavailable.

Since we posted about the compromised CA incident and related browser fixes, the incident has been labeled “Comodogate”. Quite a bit of information has been released since then.

This past week, another concrete example of the very foundation of trust on the web was shaken with the final coordination of an effort between a compromised Certificate Authority and web browser providers.

Over the weekend, a lot of Facebook users started receiving malicious chat messages from their friends followed by a shortened URL

A short while ago, I decided to prepare a presentation on web vulnerabilities and specifically on XSS attacks. I selected the most popular Russian social networking website, VKontakte.ru, as a test bed.

This is Kaspersky Lab’s annual threat analysis report covering the major issues faced by corporate and individual users alike as a result of malware, potentially harmful programs, crimeware, spam, phishing and other different types of hacker activity.