Archive for November, 2007

Voice Over Internet Telephony (VOIP) is bound to fall victim to voice spam, a point that was proven when the University of Columbia was attacked last week. It is difficult to say whether the target was chosen due to lack of decent firewall policy or because of the fact that the co-author of the protocol that VOIP services (except skype) run on, Henning Schulzrinne, is a professor there. The attack left several unsolicited marketing messages on multiple phone extentions. More...

Researchers at SecureWorks say thousands of victims have been scammed already and there’s more to come. And, you guessed it - it’s Russia and Eastern European countries to blame. They are said to be using Russian Business Network (RBN) and other ISPs, hosting outlets to lure victims into clicking the malicious ads. More...

Computer worms used to be the worst malware that could infect a computer some time ago. Worms are pretty dangerous: they can replicate themselves, spread to remote computers and corrupt files. Worms are similar to viruses, but they can perform additional actions besides the destructive function both viruses and worms have. More...

10 years ago hackers were mainly just hobbyists, but nowadays they’ve been replaced by sophisticated criminals, who can get in your system without you even noticing it. This can be done in many ways, which get more and more complex, and complexity is certainly the worst enemy of security. With technology rapidly becoming faster and more complex, it’s getting harder to keep the wolf from a door. More...

It’s business as usual and while spammers keep changing their techniques, researchers keep developing new technology to counter them. Google has been used as a search tool for vulnerabilities in the past. Now it's junk mail developers turn – spammers started using advanced search features to disguise the URLs of spamvertised websites. More...

Recent Study organized by security vendor Prevx revealed that one in six personal computers is infected with some kind of malware. 300000 computers were scanned during this study, so the results are capable of reflecting the global tendency of infections approximately. According to the report by Prevx, 5000 to 10000 new malicious programs appear daily and even major security vendors can’t keep pace with new infections. More...

We bet you have enough trouble with spam as it is, but now it’s stalking us on our mobile phones as well. And while computer spam just eats your time and nerve, phone spam might cost you money, as you may have to pay for incoming unsolicited messages. Ferris Research states that US mobile phone users will get 1. More...

During an Information Technology Association of America security workshop, government security officials have expressed their concerns about some particular tendencies in the security field. The thing that worries these experts most is the growing number of attacks through applications, especially web applications, now that the systems themselves have greatly improved their security. "That concerns me mainly because of the push to e-government. More...

Hackers have been reported to rely on a virtual stripper in order to get past CAPTCHAs (Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart). This method is most useful for spammers, who usually use web-based emails for their schemes, but often have the trouble of automating CAPTCHAs, which are used to help prevent accounts belonging to bots. The particular scheme involves a virtual stripper, "Melissa", who is seen with less and less clothes every time a user correctly decodes a CAPTCHA. More...