The Inquisitr » virus

Rappin’ Doc warns about H1N1 virus

Steven Hodson — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:31:06 +0000

While it might not seem to be a subject to write and perform a rap song about a flu virus that hasn’t stopped Jerome Clark, medical director of the Long Island Railroad,from applying his skills to creating one. With a track record of doing the same thing for asthma and diabetes his latest creation is being entered in a contest the Department of health and Human Services is sponsoring to select the best swine-flu public service announcement.

Twitter infected by StalkDaily Worm

Dennis Bjørn Petersen — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 07:27:23 +0000

Yesterday Twitter was hit by a worm. This is the first serious worm attack on Twitter. At first the reports were very mixed, some said you got infected by visiting StalkDaily, others if you visited a Twitter profile page. The affected Twitter accounts would tweet this message:

Hey everyone, join www. StalkDaily. com. It’s a site like Twitter but with pictures, videos, and so much more!

It turns out the worm can be contracted by visiting affected Twitter profile pages. The symptom was the above mentioned tweet. The StalkDaily Worm is just as easy to remove as it is to contract it. You have to make sure that the URL in your Twitter profile page is as it should be.

It could look like this:

Name gangsterboy

Location Google

Web http://”>

If you are using a Twitter client you should be safe, but if you use a web-client stay away from suspicious looking profile pages until they look safe.

Twitter closed the security hole (cross-site scripting vulnerability) 3 hours ago and are assuring us that no vital information was lost. Twitter also recommends that you reset your password. @spam says:

If you have been locked out of your acct due to the StalkDaily issue, pls do a p/w reset; we may have reset your p/w for safety.

According to BNO News Mickeyy Money from StalkDaily has admitted responsibility for the Twitter worm.

I am the person who coded the XSS which then acted as a worm when it auto updated a users profile and status, which then infected other users who viewed their profile. I did this out of boredom, to be honest. I usually like to find vulnerabilities within websites and try not to cause too much damage, but start a worm or something to give the developers an insight on the problem and while doing so, promoting myself or my website.

Contrary to what some sites might say, StalkDaily has claimed full responsibility for the attack.

Thanks for the virus Fisher-Price

Steven Hodson — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 03:25:00 +0000

According to a report surfacing on CBS news station WBZ children’s toy maker Fisher-Price decided to send along some extra goodies with one of their cameras for children. The FP Kid-Tough digital camera is infecting the computers that connect to it via the USB cable supplied with the toy.

Anna Tapper couldn’t wait to tear open and try out her favorite present.

"I take pictures of lots of things," Anna said.

Her father, Jeff Tapper, said she had a big smile on her face the minute she knew what it was.
"She was glad to have her own camera and she didn’t have to ask mom and dad for theirs and she could take as many pictures as she wanted," Tapper said.

When Tapper went to download her work, he found her camera had two viruses. Luckily, his anti-virus software spotted them before he downloaded them onto his computer. Without an up-to-date virus-fighter, his laptop could’ve been infected.

"Especially since it’s a kid’s digital camera it’s the last thing you’d expect to have a virus on it," Tapper said.

Source: WBZTV

Google is already showing a number of hits on the Fisher-Price camera virus

[hat tip to the Consumerist]

[graphic courtesy of CBS]

Firefox Threat: “Rare” Malware Targeting Browsers

JR — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:20:05 +0000

Firefox users, be warned: A “novel” and “rare” type of malware floating around the Web may try to steal your banking passwords directly through your browser.

The program, called Trojan.PWS,ChromeInject.A, looks like a regular Firefox plug-in once it gets into your system. In fact, it’ll show up in the browser as part of Greasemonkey, the fully legit and quite handy customization tool.

This bad boy, though, won’t do you any good. Researchers at BitDefender found the malware will automatically run every time you start Firefox, then use JavaScript to identify any of about 100 different banking and financial sites you might surf to. Bank of America, Wachovia, and even PayPal are said to be included. Once it sees you on one of those sites, it’ll snag your login info and password, then send it all to a server in Russia.

Most people are being bitten by the ChromeInject bug by either downloading a program they think is legit, or by the phenomenon known as “drive-by download,” in which an e-mail or Web site installs the program without the user’s knowledge.

Antivirus programs will likely add protection against the bug before long — BitDefender says it already has — but in the meantime, the smartest thing to do is to keep up your own safeguard. Mozilla’s official add-on site has no instances of the bug, researchers say. Mozilla has been extra vigilant in its add-on scanning since some questionable code was found in a Vietnamese language pack on its site back in May.

BitDefender

Asus Messes Up – Again

Steven Hodson — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:17:57 +0000

Last month Asus hit the tech headlines when it was found out that the recovery DVD that they were shipping out contained a cracking tool, some confidential Microsoft documents and Asus application source code. Well according to the folks at Geek.com it appears that Asus hasn’t learn any quality control lessons from that experience. It seems that a number of the their Eee Box models have been shipped with a virus hitching a ride on the hard drive.

The unwanted addition to the factory fresh computer is from the W32/Usbalex family which is triggered by a file called recycle.exe that sits on the D: drive. the moment you access the D: drive on an infected machine this recycle.exe is launched which then tries to infect the main C: drive. Additionally another worm called W32.Gammima.AG has been found on some machines.

The following models are believed to be the bearer of this wormy goodness

Model: EEEBOXB202-B UPC:610839761807

Model: EEEBOXB202-W UPC:610839761814

Model: EBXB202BLK/VW161DUPC: 610839530526

Model: EBXB202WHT/VW161D-W UPC: 610839531202

Model: EBXB202BLK/VK191T UPC: 610839547753

Now Asus has confirmed that some machines have been shipped that contain these additional goodies and in the press release about this incident (translated from Japanese) they have apologized for this happening. Granted apologies are good and they are doing what they can via their support site but come on guys two incidents like this is just unacceptable. I think Asus is going to have to do some serious work on their quality control but even still this isn’t going to be very helpful to their brand name.

July Sets E-Mail Virus Record

JR — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:16:04 +0000

July has set a 2008 record for virus-laden e-mail, according to tracking information released by Google’s Apps Security & Compliance Team this afternoon.

The data shows more malicious messages sent in July than in any other month so far this year. The worst was on July 24, when 10 million infected e-mails went out around the world.

Google says a UPS scam accounted for much of the traffic. The e-mails had what looked like a link to package tracking information but ended up being a link to malware instead. Another offender was a fake CNN newsletter, also containing dangerous links.

For August, the team has found a shift to infected file attachments — a phenomenon that had been decreasing in recent months. The particular case cited uses encrypted RAR files.

Update: Moments after publishing this, I received a virus-linked message myself. Good timing.

Dear valued PayPal member:
Due to concerns, for the safety and integrity of the paypal
account we have issued this warning message.
It has come to our attention that your PayPal account information needs to be
updated as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to
reduce the instance of fraud on our website. If you could please take 5-10 minutes
out of your online experience and update your personal records you will not run into
any future problems with the online service.

However, failure to update your records will result in account suspension.
Please update your records on or before August 14, 2008.
Once you have updated your account records your paypal account
service will not be interrupted and will continue as normal.
To update your PayPal records click on the following link:

Thank You.
PayPal UPDATE TEAM

Of course, the links led to nonsense domains that had nothing to do with PayPal.

Viruses Hit Mozilla, MP3s

JR — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:38:47 +0000

Right now, virus-related problems are spreading like… well, viruses.

First up, Mozilla is admitting it made a major mistake. The Firefox developers sent out a warning today that one of the browser’s language plug-ins is infected with malicious code. The Vietnamese language pack has been found to contain the adware as a result of a virus that may have been on the developer’s network, unbeknownst to him.

“This code is the result of a virus infection, but does not contain the virus itself,” explained Mozilla Security Chief William Snyder.

“This usually results in the user seeing unwanted ads, but may be used for more malicious actions,” he added.

The bug is believed to be from the Xorer Trojan. Mozilla says it did conduct an initial scan of the program but did not catch the issue until now.

“We are also adding after-the-fact scans of everything to address this sort of case in the future,” Snyder said.

At the same time, McAfee is cautioning that it’s seen an increase in fake MP3 files being used to carry dangerous code. A security expert with the company claims 360,000 users have had problems in the past days. You can find a list of the problematic filenames to avoid on the McAfee Labs Blog.

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