The meat was analyzed using a new technique called DNA Barcoding which is a quick analysis tool to tell you what species a virus or bacteria falls into. In this particular study the test found zoonotic retrovirus, simian foamy viruses, and several nonhuman primate herpes viruses.

The illegal trade in exotic meat is big business in the Unites states.  Legally, more than 1.5 billion live animals were brought into the US from 200-2006, 90% of them for pets.  This only gives a slight picture of how many may be smuggled in illegally.

The fear is that most of the world’s worst viruses, at some point, jumped form animals to humans.  The most recent case was SARS (Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome) which jumped from Civets (a type of wild cat) to Chinese butchers in 2003.

W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health told Environment News Service,

“Exotic wildlife pets and bushmeat are Trojan horses that threaten humankind at sites where they are collected in the developing world as well as the U.S. Our study underscores the importance of surveillance at ports, but we must also encourage efforts to reduce demand for products that drive the wildlife trade.”

The study was the first of its kind, but in the future much more research is going to be needed.  The danger posed to the nation is too great to worry about potential costs.

Dr. Kristine Smith, lead author of the study said,

“Although the findings to date are from a small pilot study, they remind us of the potential public health risk posed by illegal importation of wildlife products – a risk we hope to better characterize through expanded surveillance at ports of entry around the country.”

Do you think the US should spend more money to keep exotic viruses out of the country?

Herpes and HIV Viruses Enter US Through Smuggled African Bush Meat is a post from: The Inquisitr

A special thanks to MalwareCity and BitDefender for providing this awesome infographic.

The History Of Computer Viruses [Malware Infographic] is a post from: The Inquisitr

There isn’t much said about it but it is well known in security circles that the Predator and Reaper drones used by the American military do have security flaws with the most well known one being that the video sent to US ground troops is unencrypted.

However word has broken that about the fact that a computer virus has infected Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilot’s keystrokes as they fly remote missions over Afghanistan and other war zones.

It seems that the virus was first notice almost two weeks ago by the military and its Host-Based Security System. This discovery hasn’t stopped any of the missions being flown and there has been no confirmation yet of any classified data being sent to outside sources.

Ars Technica is reporting that sources within the military and familiar with the infection are saying that every effort to remove the infection is being taken but every time they remove one instance of the virus another replaces it.

Military security experts aren’t sure how the infection got started int he first place and they aren’t sure of just how far the infection has spread but they are pretty sure that it has hit both classified and unclassified machines.

This uncertainty leaves open the possibility that classified inc=formation may have indeed been captured via the virus payload and sent to outside individuals.

The US Reaper and Predator drone fleet hit by virus is a post from: The Inquisitr

According to the Norton Cybercrime Report for 2011, more than two thirds of online adults have been a victim of cybercrime in their lifetime. Every second, 14 adults become a victim of cybercrime, resulting in more than one million cybercrime victims every day.

Globally, the most common type of cybercrime is computer viruses and malware with 54 percent of the 19,636 respondents to the study saying that they have experienced it in their lifetime. Online scams (11 percent) and phishing messages (10 percent) follow.

Among adults, men between 18 and 31 years old who access the Internet from their mobile phone as more likely victims of cybercrime.

Despite the severity of cybercrime, people are obviously not in tune with reality. This is manifested by the fact that while 74 percent of respondents say they are aware of cybercrime, many are still not taking precautionary measures: they do not protect their personal information online; about 47 percent do not review their credit card statements for fraud; and 61 percent don’t use complex passwords or change them regularly.

Adam Palmer, Norton Lead Cybersecurity Advisor, stressed the seriousness of cybercrime, saying:

“There is a serious disconnect in how people view the threat of cybercrime. Cybercrime is much more prevalent than people realize. Over the past 12 months, three times as many adults surveyed have suffered from online crime versus offline crime, yet less than a third of respondents think they are more likely to become a victim of cybercrime than physical world crime in the next year. And while 89 percent of respondents agree that more needs to be done to bring cybercriminals to justice, fighting cybercrime is a shared responsibility. It requires us all to be more alert and to invest in our online smarts and safety.”

Don’t you think it’s high time to change your year-old password?

Study Reveals More Than 1 Million CyberCrime Victims Daily is a post from: The Inquisitr

The other day John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame and unofficial spokesman for Apple wrote a post full of quotes from other dated posts where the writers were brazen enough to suggest that Mac’s long safe harbor against malware, trojans, and viruses would come to an end one day.

I’ve written much the same thing on more than one occasion but it is always nice when you have some pro’s to back you up as Sophos is today.

In a post by Chester Wisniewski on the Sophos blog he warns that they have come across a JavaScript fake scanner meant to convince Mac users that their computers are infected.

This step is extra important on OS X as users will have to install the malware and enter in their administrative credentials for the privilege of infected themselves.

Even worse, the attackers are poisoning search terms and images related to Mother’s Day. Simply searching Google for seemingly innocent content to honor your mum could end up with a malware infection.

Mac users who happen upon a poisoned search result it will pop up a fake anti-virus scanner written in JavaScript that looks just like the OS X Finder application.

Oh dear me, is that some wolves I hear howling in the distance?

Fact is that the day will come when Macs, iPhones, iPads become equal opportunity targets for malware and all those other nasties out there and no amount of quote stuff into a quasi post by John Gruber will change that.

It’s just a matter of time.

Hey Gruber, You Might Want to Reconsider Crying Wolf is a post from: The Inquisitr

Do you know where those fingers that are touching your favorite mobile gadget have been?

Well according to a new study by Timothy Julian, a Stanford University doctoral student, and some British researchers our fancy mobile devices we love to show-off could harbor 18  times more bacteria than a flush handle in a typical men’s washroom.

According to Julian’s study, published online in July by the Journal of Applied Microbiology, the risks of transmitting pathogens from glass surfaces to a person’s skin are relatively high.

“If you put virus on a surface, like an iPhone, about 30 percent of it will get on your fingertips,” Julian said. In turn, “a fair amount of it may go from your fingers to your eyes, mouth or nose,” the most likely routes of infection.

Of course, no one can be sure how many people have gotten sick from sharing touch-screen electronics. But the devices add to the growing list of so-called fomites – frequently handled objects – that can spread pathogens such as the flu virus.

Hmm, one might want to reconsider the idea of using a phone condom after all.

Mobile devices are the newest health scare is a post from: The Inquisitr

So maybe this is why you’re fat.

A study published in the September 20th online edition of the medical journal Pediatrics indicates that children who had been infected with adenovirus 36, a strain of the common cold that causes standard cold symptoms as well as gastrointestinal ones, weighed an average of 50 pounds more than children who had not been infected with the same virus.

The study examined 124 children between the ages of eight and 18, 67 of whom were considered obese according to their BMI, gender and age. 22% of the children classified as obese tested positive for antibodies for AD36, compared with 7% of the kids who were not considered obese.

Study senior author Dr. Jeffrey B. Schwimmer, who is in charge of weight and wellness at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, says that a vaccine based on the results of the study is a possibility, albeit distant. Dr. Schwimmer hopes, however, that the results could eventually impact how people view and treat obesity-related issues:

What Schwimmer does hope the findings will do is get people to “move away from assigning blame, and broaden the way we think about obesity. Currently, there’s a somewhat simplistic belief that obesity is just a person’s own fault, or in the case of children, the fault of the family. But, that’s an overly simplistic view, and it’s not helpful,” he said.

A doctor occupying a similar post in a Pittsburgh children’s hospital viewed the findings in a slightly different light:

For his part, Dr. Goutham Rao, clinical director of the Weight Management and Wellness Center at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, said the findings bring up the “age-old chicken or egg problem — Does this virus disrupt certain pathways and cause obesity? Or, do obese kids tend to have this virus more often?”

Dr. Rao suggested that most childhood obesity could be curbed by limiting video game and computer time and eating family meals together.

Strain of common cold linked to childhood obesity is a post from: The Inquisitr

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

Malware served up based on operating system is a post from: The Inquisitr

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.

Apple and its security issues it doesn’t like to acknowledge is a post from: The Inquisitr

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.

FBI, U.S. Marshals hit by mystery virus is a post from: The Inquisitr

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.

BBC shows what happens when you buy a botnet is a post from: The Inquisitr

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.

No more making fun of Windows security for Mac users is a post from: The Inquisitr