Category: sophos

Mac Malware on the Rise drive by Downloads

Paul

Photo by Incase Designs Photo by Incase Designs

More and more there seems to be a building trend with Malware writers are developing ways to find both Mac systems and PC Systems. In a diary talking about that one mans journey leads to a site that can detect which system you are on and offer up Malware for that system. He also has some other examples of this on a Mac Trojan in the wild.

Now more and more[intlink id=”2173″ type=”post”] Apple users think they are not vulnerable[/intlink] to the types of antics that the PC users have to deal with day by day.  This however proves they are “WRONG”.   I will keep telling people whether PC or Mac that you need to have [intlink id=”2205″ type=”page”]Anti-virus and Firewalls[/intlink] installed to help protect yourself from be victim to this type of stuff.  Just a last week Sopho’s issued the OSX/Tored-Fam worm to their databases.   Sopho’s even talks about this in detail on their blog.

[ad]Though admittedly it is the people who are searching for Porn that will most likely install this malware.  It however begs the question, hasn’t this been done on the PC systems before?  I have to think this is because the Apple is getting a bigger share of the systems in the world.   For the one reason people still think they will never get Viruses or Worms on there system.   I on the other hand know that this is just the beginning and in the near future Apple will have to recommend to people to have Anti-virus software on your system.  They did that in the past but changed their minds.

Apple’s stance on malware and their systems are one that will be their downfall.   I’ve talked in the past about [intlink id=”694″ type=”post”]Mac\’s getting viruses and other such Malware[/intlink].  Although to Apple’s benefit they do offer ProtectMac AntiVirus for the OSX.   I don’t know how good this is but I do think they need to change their advertising and not make it seem like the Macintosh has can’t get viruses.   I think it would be really funny to see Justin Long in the Mac ads get a Virus, although I don’t think that will happen it is something that I would love to see.

Link shortening and the new wave malware on Twitter

Paul

I’ve been reading what Sans Internet storm has to say about twitter and how that can bring malware to Twitter. Sans argues that there is no reliable way to determine the information someone says, and that is where I am wanting to talk about the way people are creating what I call Link baiting or Blind links. You ever click on a link in twitter to find it it wasn’t what you thought it was?

[ad]I also thought of what Sopho’s blog about today where someone hijacked 2.2 Million redirect Urls using Cli.gs services to shorten links. I was reading through the Cli.gs blog about the incident and it came from Canada but I don’t think the user of the website who had all that traffic was involved in any way shape or form to the hacking of Cli.gs website. I personally think this was done to prove a point and it is a very good point.

That in the future there will be someone to redirect links to a malware site and it won’t be pretty. Think about it any shorten url service like Tinyurl or others who could have their links all be directed to a website. that is a big number and it worries me. Let us go through the numbers a little bit and see. 98.2% of people go to Tinyurl.com and don’t preview the url first. Half of the clicks in Bit.ly are coming from the US, which means we are more at risk of clicking on a link that could be a virus or malware.

Now I know people don’t have time to check out all the links or forget to check before they click. So I have a few plugins that might help with this.   LongUrl Pluggin  Can use 72 different web services including Bit.ly, Tinyurl, Cli.gs, and a bunch more.  This is a good little plugin to help prevent yourself from clicking those links that you are unsure of.    I would also recommend getting a [intlink id=”2205″ type=”page”]Free Anti-virus and Free Firewall[/intlink] to better protect yoru system.  I wouldn’t use Internet Explorer it seems that is more easier to infect with malware than Firefox.  [intlink id=”3668″ type=”post”]Firefox still has to worry[/intlink] but not as much.

Careless Facebook profiling can lead to Identity Theft!

Paul

I just got in contact with a old friend from High school and another friend of mine suggest the new friend. I was looking at her profile and couldn’t believe what I saw:

Something users shouldn't do!!!As you can see this is not good I was amazed at how many people are giving out there birthdays and who they are married to to friends and family. So we heard about how people are claiming they need help or are in need of desperate money. This is nothing new, as you know people are having hard economy times and people are using the social engineering to scam people out of money.

I feel that I should warn people the important necessity.   You shouldn’t be broadcasting your DOB and who your married to to your friends, just in case they get hacked.

Recent activity indicates that identity thieves are hacking into trustworthy profiles before selling on the login details to interested parties. This information is used by spammers to target legitimate users, posting misleading links on their “walls” – personalized message boards.

[Via Computing.Co.UK]

This deservese a little mind and a lot of understanding.   By the spammers hacking into facebook accounts they have the chance to scam or spam people with links to possibly have a virus or trojan installer.

[ad#ad2-right]For example This one blog talks about the Virus:

Symantec’s Norton Antivirus software has flagged this as a “high risk” Infostealer.Gampass virus. More info on this particular Trojan vius is here. (Note: Symantec warns the risk level is “low,” since it originated in 2006, but this new Facebook email is a new iteration of the same virus.)

You might be inclined to click on this link because it’s from a friend, but they did not intentionally send it to you — and yes, their Facebook photo is attached, too.

[Via Sync-blog]

facebookident2Now I went searching through my friends list and also found this little bit of information.  As you can see this one is asking for people to use there account to scam people out of money.  They could use this to find out even more information of the Other partner and make you believe your talking to the real deal.   Saying they need money because they are stuck over seas or something like that.   I’ve seen this on other blogs where people have sent money to “friends” but are actually people who are the scammers.  Then if you send the money you are out of luck with your money and possibly your friends to.  I am sure there are more but this is prime examples of what you shouldn’t do and why.

So what can you do to prevent Identity Theft and/or being scammed?

    [ad#cricket-right-ez]

  • Roboform Review — A Password Manager that will help protect your passwords from key loggers and other such phishing sites.    I strongly recommend it to to all who are security minded. (Never use the same password for all your accounts)

  • Are you worried about your identity? — This is good information in checking out sites that might be questionable.  You can find out what type of site it by using your brains.

  • Old Phish Become New again — This is blog post about twitter and what may happen if you did give out your password.   This is a good example of why you never should give out your password to third party websites.

  • Twitter Spammers a getting more smarter — This is also good example of what happens when you see become friends with someone who isn’t real.   You could be the next to be spammed and/or impersonated.

If you follow some common steps you to could prevent from being the victim or getting your Identitiy stolen.   Some things to remember is Never tell anyone your Birthday the whole date like someone did on twitter a few days ago.  It’s nice that they are growing older but that gives people that much more information to use to steal your money or your idenitiy.   Think before you give out any personal information like Age, Married, who your married to and anything that might be used to be able to access your account or your impersonate you.  Remember only you can prevent from being scammed or lossing your identity, you wouldn’t want to have to pay for your mistakes.

Not safe to download a worm : Project Snowblind

Paul

It looks like I missed this one yesterday. There seems to be a rogue and probably somewhat of a warez version of the game Project Snowblind.

[ad#ad2-right]ccording to Sophos:

Project: Snowblind is a multi-player first-person shooter (in the same genre as Doom) released by Eidos Interactive a few years ago.

A closer examination reveals that the installation program comes with a little nefarious piece of malware (detected by Sophos as W32/Rbot-GXL) that will drop a file called vghhost.exe. This file is actually a network worm as well as an IRC backdoor Trojan.

I must also tell people that if you want to download the demo, you can download it from the EIDO website and Download.com website. I will say I didn’t know about this one until Technibble, published something about this.  Some of the things he publishes are great for the IT Professionals who want to start their own businesses.

I also suggest the Computer Repair Utility Kit, It can be used on a USB and has some good programs that you can use in Computer repair.

Figuring out the Email-Worm Win32.Zafi.b

Paul

This is another just I just saw on the web and wanted to talk about what this little Worm does and what it’s known Aliases:

Email-Worm.Win32.Zafi.b (Kaspersky Lab) is also known as: I-Worm.Zafi.b (Kaspersky Lab), W32/Zafi.b@MM (McAfee), W32.Erkez.B@mm (Symantec), Win32.Hazafi.30720 (Doctor Web), W32/Zafi-B (Sophos), Win32/Zafi.B@mm (RAV), PE_ZAFI.B (Trend Micro), Worm/Zafi.B (H+BEDV), W32/Zafi.B@mm (FRISK), Win32:Zafi-B (ALWIL), I-Worm/Zafi.B (Grisoft), Win32.Zafi.B@mm (SOFTWIN), Worm.Zafi.B (ClamAV), W32/Zafi.B.worm (Panda), Win32/Zafi.B (Eset)

[ad#ad2-left]This worm spreads via the Internet as an attachment to infected messages, and also via local and file-sharing networks.
It is written in Assembler, and packed using FSG. It is 12800 bytes in packed form, and 33292 in unpacked form.

This Worm seems to be running through email and file sharing sites, One thing it tries to do is stop the process and deletes:
fvprotect.exe
winlogon.exe
jammer2nd.exe
services.exe

It attempts to detect antivirus program files on the computer and overwrite them with a copy of itself.

[ad#ad2-right]It also attempts to conduct DoS attacks on the following sites:

www.2f.hu
www.parlament.hu
www.virusbuster.hu
www.virushirado.hu

This seems to be a very big virus and can be removed with the use of Kapersky Virus removal tool for free for this type of virus. In order to prevent this virus in the future the user has to remember about not getting opening unknown documents or emails and not running any unkown program from an unknown file sharing.   Also remember you need to have an anti-virus  and also a firewall to protect yourself in the future.