McAfee announced on June 2, 2005, the acquisition of Wireless Security Corp, which is a privately held company that offers innovative Wi-Fi security solutions to protect home and small business wireless networks from unauthorized access to a wireless network, its contents, or Internet service.

Read More In : thepcsecurity.blogspot.com

Israeli police have uncovered a massive industrial spying ring that is alleged to have used Trojan software to snoop into some of the country’s leading companies.

The program appears to have been extremely effective at performing its function of stealing confidential documents from target companies, as well as monitoring activity on infected machines. Police are said to have gained access to a number of FTP servers based in the US and Israel and discovered a “tens of thousands” of documents pillaged by the malware from victim companies.

Read More In : thepcsecurity.blogspot.com

I believe some of us have experienced Microsoft’s MSN Messenger worm in the past couple of weeks, spreading message http://dba.hitsnow.us/pictures.php?email=my_emailaddress.hotmail.com. Once you click on the link in your messge box, it will drop a variant of W32.Spybot.Worm into the system and start propagate to your friends in your MSN list.

If you’ve infected by the MSN worm, W32.Bropia Removal Tool is what you need.

Now here comes another Instant Messenger (IM) worm targeting AOL’s Instant Messenger (AIM) software that could potentially allow an attacker to gain control of a user’s system, according to security researchers.

Quoted:
Users are sent a message containing a reference to the Star Wars film and a hyperlink, which, when clicked, downloads a worm onto the PC.

The AOL worm sends the message “hehe i found this funny movie,” encouraging users to click on a hyperlink that downloads malicious code to the user’s desktop, according to an advisory released Monday by IMLogic. From there, the worm connects to a public IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server and continues to spread through AIM messages.

Quoted:
What’s interesting about the worm is that its topical and appears to be timed with the hype around the release of “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith,” Mikko Hyppönen, director of antivirus research at F-Secure, says.

AIM users are advised not to click on hyperlinks sent from unknown users (sometimes known users are more dangerous :D ), and to make sure they have a firewall in place and get the latest security updates for when a fix is available.

[Source 1]
[Source 2]

We often talk about protecting our PC from spyware by using spyware remover or anti-spyware application, but now we have more to worry as security experts has found spyware in a spyware-removal tool – SpywareNo. It is actually being used to persuade unsuspecting Internet users to download spyware programs and Trojans.

Quoted:
SpywareNo, is installed on Internet users’ computers without warning, can be difficult to remove and may be accompanied by malicious programs that hijack victims’ Web browsers, according to interviews with spyware experts.

The company behind SpywareNo claims that it is the victim of unscrupulous online advertisers who bundle the product with noxious wares.

Quoted:
“We use affiliated advertisers to [market SpywareNo]. It is a shame that some of our advertisers do not respect the law, but unfortunately we are unable to check them all at the initial stage,” wrote a person claiming to be Jessica Simmons, SpywareNo’s public relations manager

But at least one spyware expert says the new application is just the latest example of so-called “rogue anti-spyware” programs that exploit user naiveté and frustration with spyware. Furthermore, this piece of “anti-spyware” is nasty !!

Quoted:
“The program installed by stealth. … The icon just appeared in my task tray and asked me to run it to make sure I was protected. I did not do so and just shut the program down,”

My advice is to stick with AdAware and Spybot S&D, two most trustable spyware removal tools on the net.

[Source]

Since the final release of Netscape 8.0 Browser on May 19, 2005, Netscape 8.0 has been facing problems like several publicly known security flaws. Unfortunately, just after a week of the bad news, America Online on Thursday, May 26, 2005, confirmed that a bug in its new Netscape 8 Web browser was breaking certain XML configurations in Microsoft’s IE.

The issue first surfaced on Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer Weblog, where chief IE developer Dave Massy recommended that users completely uninstall Netscape as a possible workaround.

However, AOL spokesman defended that the bug only affects “a very small percentage of IE users” who visit pages using XML technology. I don’t really agree with him as a rapidly growing number of Internet users are using RSS feed to read news, weather reports etc.

Quoted:
According to Microsoft’s Massy, Netscape 8 corrupts the XML rendering capabilities of Internet Explorer, meaning that an IE user navigating to an XML file, such as an RSS feed, is greeted with a blank page.

[Source]

You think hacker (or cracker, by right) will just come into your PC and browse around without doing anything bad?

Now you have more to worry as hackers have found a way to lock up the electronic documents (any format of the file) on your computer and then demand a ransom for their return !!

Quoted:
Security researchers at Websense, an internet security company based in San Diego, uncovered the unusual extortion plot when a corporate customer they would not identify fell victim to a virus that encrypted documents, photographs and spreadsheets. An e-mail was later sent demanding $200 for the digital keys to unlock the files.

This security problem has brought FBI’s attention. FBI said the threat was unlike other internet extortion crimes. The virus locked up at least 15 types of data files and left behind a note with instructions to send an e-mail to a particular address to purchase keys for unlocking the data. In an e-mail reply, the hacker demanded that the money should be transferred to an online bank account.

They also said that the hacker’s demand for payment might be his weakness, since bank transactions can be traced easily.

Quoted:
Joe Stewart, a researcher at the security firm Lurhq, said. “You’ve got to send the money somewhere. If it involves some sort of monetary transaction, it’s far easier to trace than an e-mail account.”

[Source]