Antivirus

Researchers said on Tuesday that they are seeing something unusual in the malware world--a virus that targets a development environment.

The virus, dubbed Win32.Induc, was written to infect applications built with Delphi, according to Nick Bilogorskiy, manager of antivirus researcher at Sonicwall. Delphi is used to write Windows programs, including database applications.

When an infected program is run on a machine running Delphi, the virus infects any software that gets compiled on that machine. The virus spreads the executable file of itself as well as the source code. It looks for a compiler on the infected system and re-compiles … Read more

AVG's free antivirus product temporarily blocked users from getting to iTunes late last week, detecting it as a Trojan, the company said on Monday.

For about five hours on Friday starting around 4 p.m. PDT, AVG users couldn't access iTunes because of the false alarm.

"AVG discovered the false alarm in the virus signature engine relating to some localization components of iTunes (so not iTunes as a virus but rather some localization components of iTunes) and it was fixed within 5 hours," AVG spokesperson Siobhan MacDermott said in a statement. "AVG would like to … Read more

White lists will be on every desktop within the next five years, according to Patrick Morley, CEO of Massachusetts-based Bit9. Morley was in town to address the Dow Jones VentureWire Technology Showcase in Redwood City, Calif., on Tuesday. He stopped by CNET News afterward to discuss why he believes white listing will be important in the next few years.

The basic idea behind "white listing" is to define a set of software, a set of vendors, and allow only those trusted applications or files from those vendors to run on your machine. If a file or application is … Read more

Since its introduction in 2006, Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare has altered the antivirus landscape. With Tuesday's announcement that Microsoft will no longer be selling the product in retail outlets but offering a new free version, code-named Morro, starting in the second half of 2009, it's sure to change the field once again.

Since Microsoft bought Romania-based antivirus firm GeCad five years ago, there has been fear among the commercial antivirus vendors that the software giant would simply bundle its malware protection within the next version of Windows. While that didn't happen--and it's unlikely to happen… Read more

On Thursday, security vendor SecureMac reported seeing new variants of AppleScript.THT Trojan horse in the wild affecting users of Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5.

The new variations exploit a vulnerability within the Apple Remote Desktop Agent, and can avoid detection by opening ports in the firewall and turning off system logging. The new Trojans can log keystrokes, take screen shots, take pictures with the Apple iSight camera, and enable file sharing, according to SecureMac.

The Trojans are using an AppleScript called ASthtv05 and/or may be bundled as an application. You must download and execute the … Read more

On Wednesday, Trend Micro CEO and co-founder Eva Chen unveiled a new vision for her company that includes "in-the-cloud" malware analysis.

Unlike the computer viruses of 20 years ago, which were slow to evolve and infected thousands of systems worldwide, malware today evolves rapidly and infects relatively few systems, creating thousands of new variants each day. Chen admits that traditional signature-based antivirus strategies may seem a bit outdated, but argues that pattern matching is still faster than running a full heuristic check of each new malware specimen. Her answer is to throw all the unknown samples up into … Read more

A new contest to be held at this year's DefCon in Las Vegas in August hopes to prove that signature-based antivirus is dead, a move that one leading antivirus researcher says is "not a good idea."

The goal of the Race to Zero is simple: obfuscate a malicious code so that it evades well-known antivirus engines.

Contestants will be given a sample set of viruses and malicious code that they must modify and then upload through the contest portal. Once accepted, the sample will be sent through a number of leading antivirus engines (perhaps using VirusTotal.com … Read more

Users of Microsoft Windows Live OneCare may have found their antivirus protection a little too proactive. Over the weekend, OneCare informed some Skype users that the popular voice-over-IP application was infected with the Trojan Win32/Vundo.gen!D.

Not true, says Skype, which noted that Microsoft has since repaired its overzealous signature file.

On Friday, OneCare subscribers started seeing their access to Skype blocked. Microsoft says it was trying to block a multiple-component family of programs that deliver "out of context" pop-up advertisements, and mistakenly included Skype.

On Tuesday, four days later, it sent out a revised signature … Read more

Corrected at 6:50 a.m. PDT March 26: The last paragraph has been revised to correctly describe a second antivirus partnership.

The Anti-Malware Test Lab and AV-Comparatives.org announced on Tuesday an alliance designed to create one of the most respected sources of objective, independent information about antivirus products.

Together, the pair said, they intend by year's end to create a unique system of integrated tests for determining the effectiveness of commercial antivirus software.

Andrea Clementi, founder of AV-Comparatives, said in a statement that "the partnership with Anti-Malware Test Lab will allow us to evaluate more aspects … Read more