Gizmodo Serves Up Scareware

Hackers posing as advertisers for large corporations have been targeting high volume sites buying ad space and infecting their links with scareware. The latest to be fooled into taking the ads is the popular tech blog gizmodo. In a statement on the site, gizmodo says:

"I'm really sorry but we had some malware running on our site in ad boxes for a little while last week on Suzuki ads. They somehow fooled our ad sales team through an elaborate scam.

"It's taken care of now, and only a few people should have been affected, but this isn't something we take lightly as writers, editors and tech geeks,"

The malicious sites associated with the ads try to convince users that their computer is infected with viruses and trojans, and offer them a download remedy which is actually harmful code that can be used by perpetrators to acquire information on the infected PC such as credit card details.

A similar scam got past the folks at the New York Times last month.

Source: BBC News

Malware Authors Set Traps Via Twitter

According to CNN, "Cyber criminals have been targeting Twitter users by creating thousands of messages (tweets) embedded with words involving trending topics and malicious URLs," Sean-Paul Correll, a threat researcher for Panda Labs. These are not new attacks but a new way of luring the unsuspecting in.

"The fundamental fact is cyber criminals are highly organized with sophisticated corporate structures and business chains," said Michael Fraser, director of the Communications Law Centre at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia.

"They have R&D departments, strong distribution networks and Web sites for the discerning cyber criminal," Fraser said.

This stuff isn't going away anytime soon folks, so keep your patch levels up and your anti-virus current...

Most Spam Served From The US

ars technica has an interesting story about the origin of spam. Citing the most recent Sophos report, the article says that the US hosts 37 percent of all malware sites followed by China (27.7 percent) and Russia (9.1 percent). Also of note is the rise in frequency of infected e-mails. In 2007 the ratio of infected e-mails to non-infected was 1 in 909, in 2008 the numbers were 1 in 714. 

AVG 8 Runnig Up Numbers On The Web

The Register is reporting that the latest edition of AVG's antivirus software is running up page counts all over the Internet. AVG 8 includes a new malware scanning service that checks links returned by search engines and advises users whether or not the site is safe to visit. According to this article, AVG estimates that 20 million machines have upgraded to the new version of the software and those users are racking up a pile of hits, "traffic has spiked as much as 80 per cent on some sites." "A situation like this where there is in effect false traffic, where something is generating what is bogus data, leads to wrong budget decisions and marketing activities," says Barry Parshall, director of product management at WebTrends, a popular web analytics firm. "I completely get the value proposition [of Linkscanner], but it would be responsible of them to identify themselves, with agent code or whatever it might be, so legitimate businesses can serve their customers properly."

Breaking the black market

Here is a really interesting story from ars technica. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the International Computer Science Institute, and the University of California, San Diego are collaborating to disrupt the trade of malware and credit card information on black market web sites. Using economic theories the researchers are messing with the reputations of the traders and creating false identities to inject doubt into the market. It seems that those who trade in such commodities place as much stock in a black market traders reputation as you or I might in an eBay sellers reputation. Using this as a tool against the traders the researchers are injecting damaging misinformation about sellers into the markets and creating false identities so as to drop the trust levels and place doubt in the minds of the traders. I love it! It's kinda like stringing along those Nigerian scammers... well done.