Web threats

A new reincarnation of the infamous Storm Worm — or Zhelatin as it is called by Kaspersky Lab – has been making the rounds in the news lately.

While I was reading the Wired article on how Alberto Gonzalez, the TJX hacker who caused $171.5 million in losses, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, I came across an interesting black SEO campaign that distributes fake AVs through Google.

As I was saying in the yesterday’s blog post, we were expecting the number of Koobface C&C servers to start growing sometime this week

Two weeks ago we recorded a surge in Koobface, the highly prolific worm infecting social networking sites.

2009 was the latest milestone both in the history of malware and in the history of cybercrime, with a marked change in direction in both areas. This year laid the foundation of what we will see in the future.

Another day, another disaster, and once again, the bad guys are exploiting this subject to poison search results so that those looking for some news get lead to a page offering a rogue AV solution.

The first Top Twenty lists malicious programs, adware and potentially unwanted programs that were detected and neutralized when accessed for the first time, i.e. by the on-access scanner.

Today the UK Council on Child Internet Safety [UKCCIS] is launching its Child Internet Safety Strategy. The strategy is designed to encourage children not to disclose personal information, to block unwanted messages on social networks and to report inappropriate behaviour.

National Anti-Bullying Week is kicking off in the UK today. This year the focus is on combating cyberbullying, with lots of resources for schools, a roadshow, and videos discussing the problem of bullying.

In recent years, the Web has become the main distribution point for malware. Malicious programs are hosted on websites; users are then either tricked into running these programs manually, or exploits are used to execute the malware automatically on victim machines.

We’ve been looking at the infrastructure of the Gumblar malware and found some curious facts on how Gumblar operates which we would like to share to make hosting owners aware of the Gumblar threat.

Kaspersky Lab presents its monthly malware statistics for October. From this month onwards, the data used is gathered from all products which use the Kaspersky Security Network (KSN), i.e. products from both the 2009 and 2010 lines.

After a lengthy interlude, we’re renewing our monthly malware almanac by popular demand.

This article is a study of one spam email and illustrates the methods employed by today’s cyber criminals to create botnets and conduct mass spam mailings.

Kaspersky Lab presents its monthly malware statistics for September