AntivirusWorld

Doctor Web virus analysts have discovered a large-scale mailing of spam messages with attached malicious programs.

Starting June 1 Doctor Web virus analysts have been registering a steadily increasing number of e-mails with attached malware.

In the night between May 31 and June 1 users could get messages informing them that they received an e-card from one of their family members. However, the attached ecard.exe was nothing more than a Trojan detected by Dr.Web anti-viruses as Trojan.DownLoad.37569.

The Russian anti-virus vendor Doctor Web warns users of a new Trojan that deletes all files and directories on a compromised computer. First cases of machines getting infected by Trojan.KillFiles.904 have been registered in the first days of June 2009.

Doctor Web presents the virus activity review for May 2009. In the past month the share of ransomware among other malicious programs remained the same but virus makers honed their social engineering techniques and created new tools that would make their work easier. May also saw several new rootkits. Spammers were even more eager to advertise their services using new ways to bypass spam-filters.

Ransomware

As development of malicious programs became purely commercial, a new type of virus threats — ransomware — emerged in the Internet.

According to a survey carried out by Panda Security, more than half of adolescents between 15 and 18 years old use the Internet daily, spending, on average, 18.5 hours a week connected. The survey revealed that some 32% of this online activity is dedicated to studying, while the remaining 68% involves leisure activities, such as playing games online, watching videos, listening to music, chatting, etc.

Search engines search

Popular search terms are strongly influenced by the hot topics talked about by the general public. During the latest weeks one would presume that search topics like "swine flu" and "H1N1" are among those most searched after. It seems like a safe bet to guess that neither of these were among the top million search topics half a year ago.

PandaLabs, Panda Security’ malware detection and analysis laboratory, has observed how cyber-criminals are starting to use their own search engines to lead users to malicious pages, often created for distributing malware. This new trend underlines how cyber-crime is becoming increasingly professional.

BitDefender today released the ten most prevelant threats facing Internet users in the month of April. The top is still dominated by Trojans, as it was in March. These threats rely solely on tricking users to spread the e-threat, and they occupy seven of the ten positions this month.

Only a couple of worms, exploits and viruses break up the "trojan parade."

Introduction

The social network Twitter has become extremely popular in quite a short time, with several million members. In brief Twitter is a community where the members are able to post information (about whatever) of up to 140 characters. Members of this community are able to follow other members' postings, and may thus be updated about friends' and others' activities and interests.

One should however, as always be cautious and observe common sense.

Top 10 exploitation attempts detected for this period, ranked by vulnerability traffic. Percentage indicates the portion of activity the vulnerability accounted for out of all attacks reported in this edition. Severity indicates the general risk factor involved with the exploitation of the vulnerability, rated from low to critical. Critical issues are outlined in bold: