malware

Spam made up 90.4 percent of all e-mail traffic in June, with botnets accounting for the vast majority of those unsolicited messages, according to a new report from Symantec's MessageLabs.

Spam sent out from botnets, or networks of zombie PCs, made up 83.2 percent of unsolicited e-mail messages this month, MessageLabs said Tuesday in a statement. In May, 57.6 percent of spam was sent from known botnets, with Donbot responsible for 18.2 percent of these messages.

According to the messaging security company, the biggest botnet currently is Cutwail, which has doubled in size and output … Read more

Updated October 30 at 9:58 a.m. PDT: The software was called SecureTwitter when this article was first published. The name was later changed to SecureTweets and the article has been updated to reflect that.

Finally, there's a tool that can help prevent people from clicking on URLs that appear to come from friends on Twitter and other social media sites but which lead to sites hosting malware.

Web security firm Finjan began offering this week a free browser plug-in dubbed SecureTweets that warns users when they encounter a malicious URL in Twitter, as well as in Gmail, … Read more

Updated June 25 at 9:00 a.m. PDT with Trend Micro saying the Trojan is harmful to Macs and PCs.

Venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki got more than he bargained for from an automated feed he set up on his Twitter account.

Some of Kawasaki's more than 139,000 Twitter followers noticed something strange when they saw a particular non-VC-related tweet sent from his account on Tuesday.

The update advertised a sexy video of "Gossip Girl" star Leighton Meester and had a link leading to a site where, if the visitor clicked to view the video (and … Read more

Updated at 2:40 p.m. PDT with comment on what happens if a user already has antivirus software installed and at 1:45 p.m. with AVG comment.

Microsoft will launch a public beta of its anti-malware service, Microsoft Security Essentials, on Tuesday as it phases out its Live OneCare suite in favor of a simpler free consumer security offering.

Microsoft Security Essentials, which will run on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7, will be available in the U.S., Brazil, and Israel in English and Brazilian Portuguese. A public beta version for Simplified Chinese will be available later … Read more

Last week, PBWorks founder David Weekly found out from some customers that his hosted collaboration site had been blacklisted by Symantec for hosting malware and, thus, visitors to any of the 10 million pages on PBWorks were being warned that the site wasn't safe.

"(Damn) you, Norton Safe Web. Whenever one file on one PBWorks space has a virus, all of PBworks is marked unsafe?!" a frustrated Weekly wrote on Twitter and Facebook on Thursday. In a follow-up interview, he said: "That's tarnishing our brand. It's not legitimate to basically poison the whole domain … Read more

The abstract concepts of "botnet" and "Trojan" just became a lot more concrete for me.

In less than an hour on Thursday, I was able to use programs readily available on the Internet underground for as little as $300 to infect several Windows clients and take complete control of them in a test environment.

In contrast to the real world, the McAfee Malware Experience event, which was akin to a Malware 101 class (or, in my case, Malware for Dummies), served up printed step-by-step instructions for us nonhacker journalists. But McAfee researchers said the programs used--real … Read more

The Internet might just have gotten a little safer.

The Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday that it had Pricewert shut down by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division.

Pricewert is a San Jose, Calif.-based Internet service provider that allegedly recruits, intentionally and actively participates in the distribution of spam, child pornography, and other harmful electronic content.

Generally, the commission files a complaint when it has "reason to believe" that the law has been or is being violated, and it appears to the Commission that a proceeding is in the … Read more

Malware has been found on ATMs in Eastern Europe and elsewhere that allows criminals to steal account data and PINs and even empty the machine of its cash, a computer forensics expert said.

About 20 ATMs have been compromised in that manner, mostly in Russia and Ukraine, but there are "early indications" of compromised ATMs in the U.S., said Nicholas Percoco, vice president and head of SpiderLabs at Trustwave, which provides data security and payment card compliance services.

Percoco said he could not elaborate further on where the compromised ATMs were located and how they were used. … Read more

Security firm Websense has put out an advisory warning Web site owners about malicious code that redirects surfers to seemingly safe sites.

About 40,000 Web sites appear to have been compromised with rogue JavaScript code that redirects Web surfers to a fake Google Analytics site, after which they get passed onto a site that tries to exploit Internet Explorer or Firefox vulnerabilities to infect that PC with malware, according to a Websense researcher quoted by Computerworld. Just for good measure, if the site can't find a browser vulnerability, it tries to trick the user into downloading a Trojan.… Read more