The Inquisitr » viruses

HIV Rates Among Black Americans Remain Disproportionately High

AHN — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:00:43 +0000

HIV prevalence among black Americans continues to far exceed rates among whites, despite billions of dollars in government and private spending to combat the disease, according to researchers with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The researchers wrote in a new report appearing in the November issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine that black HIV rates are 10 times higher than white Americans.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 45 percent of new HIV infections in the United States in 2006 occurred among non-Hispanic blacks. Among 13,184 adolescents and young adults in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, HIV rates among young black Americans were 20 times higher than those among their white peers.

The researchers say individual-level sexual behavior contributes to the disparity, but they placed more blame in what they term “structural violence” – a social system “characterized by inequalities in power and life chances of sufficient magnitude to restrict a group of people from realizing their full potential” that puts them “in harm’s way,” the researchers said in a statement.

Malware served up based on operating system

Steven Hodson — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:10:00 +0000

While the stick yer head segment of Mac users will almost certainly find some reason to spout their typical rhetoric about Mac’s being impervious to viruses, trojans and other such evil goodies that isn’t stopping the malware writers from improving their odds of getting you to install their crap. One of the newest tricks apparently is for the website you are visiting to detect which operating system you are running and then serve you up a nasty package for that OS.

Ivan Macalintal from Trend Micro recently came across a new variant of the DNS changer trojan that checks for which operating system is behind the browser and then will offer up the appropriate Windows or Mac installer.

This follows a similar finding last month by McAfee, which spotted the same tactic being used at sites that try to trick the user into installing a browser plug-in supposedly needed to view online videos: The bogus plug-in was offered as a ".exe" file for Windows visitors, and a ".dmg" installer file for those who browsed the site with a Mac.

Meanwhile, Symantec warned last week that it had detected several blogs that were advertising free, streaming online copies of movies that were just released in the theaters. The lure is once again a fake video plug-in, followed by either a Mac- or Windows-based version of the DNS Changer Trojan.

Source: Security Fix :: Malware Writers: Will That Be OS X, or W?

Most of these new and more dangerous delivery systems are coming at us via blogs and websites that pander to those looking for video and software that they would normally have to pay for.

The reason for this is that by making the visitor think they need some new type of codec to view some questionable video it makes them more willing to install whatever is offered up to them. This is just taking the whole social engineering up a level or two.

image courtesy of Security Fix

Apple and its security issues it doesn’t like to acknowledge

Steven Hodson — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:15:00 +0000

Now I have to be careful here on how I phrase this post because we sure wouldn’t want to see a Twitter-Friendfeed real-time angry fanboy rise from the dust and inundate us with all manner of death threats – or worse. So here goes – Apple needs to wake up to its new place in the computing landscape and start to take security seriously and better response to their users.

This is the gist of thoughts of Rich Mogull, founder of security firm Securosis and a self-professed Mac user, in both a post on TidBITS and in an interview by Dan Goodin for The Register.

"Based on a variety of sources, we know that Apple does not have a formal security program, and as such fails to catch vulnerabilities that would otherwise be prevented before product releases," writes Rich Mogull, founder of security firm Securosis and a self-described owner of seven Macs. "To address this lack, Apple should integrate secure software development into all internal development efforts."

Source: The Register

In his TidBITS post Rich provides five points that he thinks Apple needs to address when it comes to its products and security.

Appoint and Empower a Chief Security Officer
Adopt a Secure Software Development Program
Establish a Security Response Team
Manage Vulnerabilities in Included Third Party Software
Complete the Implementation of Anti-Exploration Technologies

Given that even six month after Sun warned of a vulnerability in the Java virtual machine Apple hasn’t seen fit to patch the hole Rich’s suggestions might be well heeded. Note that both Linux and Microsoft fixed the bug months ago.

No related posts.

FBI, U.S. Marshals hit by mystery virus

Steven Hodson — Fri, 22 May 2009 18:58:41 +0000

According to a post over at the cnet Security blog it appears that the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service was hit by some sort of computer virus on Thursday of last week. A spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service said that they had disconnected from the Justice Department network asa precaution. The FBI on the other hand would only say it was experiencing similar issues.

"We too are evaluating a network issue on our external, unclassified network that’s affecting several government agencies," FBI spokesman Mike Kortan told the AP.

The type of virus and where it originated from are unknown but both agencies have shut down access to the Internet and their e-mail until they had finished evaluating the situation.

BBC shows what happens when you buy a botnet

Steven Hodson — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 03:17:31 +0000

As a way to show its viewer how easily their computers could be a part of a botnet the BBC technology show Click went out and purchased what they called a low value botnet from one of the many underground Internet chatrooms. They then used that network to spam a Gmail and Hotmail account specifically setup up for this investigation.

After successfully leaving thousands of spam emails in those accounts in a matter of hours they turned their attention to performing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on a site provided by security company Prevx. Once they completed all that they wanted to do the show left messages on the infected computers in the botnet that they were infected and then disabled the botnet.

No more making fun of Windows security for Mac users

Steven Hodson — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 21:11:06 +0000

If there has always been one constant in the on-going my operating system is better than yours head butting that happens between Windows and Mac users it has been over the issue of security. Mac users have loved being able to lord over us poor ol’ Windows users how they don’t need to worry about things like malware and viruses. This obnoxious attitude hasn’t been helped either by Cupertino running ads pointing out how Mac users don’t need to worry about such silly things as viruses. As Brian Krebs says in a post about this today

Just under three months ago, I asked an employee at our local Apple store whether I needed anti-virus for my MacBook, and was told not to bother, that it was not necessary. I wonder if this means Apple will stop running television ads saying Mac users don’t have to worry about malicious software?

This of course is in total contrast to a technical note that Apple has added to its support site where they say the following

“Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple anti-virus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.”

The support advisory even goes on to recommend some possible anti-virus utilities for the Mac faithful to install on their oh so secure machines

Here are some available anti-virus utilities:

· Intego VirusBarrier X5, available from the Apple Online Store
License: commercial

· Symantec Norton Anti-Virus 11 for Macintosh, available from the Apple Online Store
License: commercial

· McAfee VirusScan for Mac
License: commercial

For years Windows users have had to suffer the better than thou abuse from Mac users and now; as more than a few Windows users have said – myself included, the tables have indeed turned. So all you Windows users out there bookmark that Apple advisory. Then the next time some Mactard starts making fun of you because of things like viruses and how they don’t have to worry about such mundane things – slap them with that link.

Neener Neener – it looks good on them.