Manufacturer: PC Perspective
Tagged: Malware

Infectious fear is infectious

PCMag and others have released articles based on a blog post from Sophos. The original post discussed how frequently malware designed for Windows is found on Mac computers. What these articles mostly demonstrate is that we really need to understand security: what it is, and why it matters. The largest threats to security are complacency and misunderstanding; users need to grasp the problem rather than have it burried under weak analogies and illusions of software crutches.

Your data and computational ability can be very valuable to people looking to exploit it.

The point of security is not to avoid malware, nor is it to remove it if you failed to avoid it. Those actions are absolutely necessary components of security -- do those things -- but they are not the goal of security. The goal of security is to retain control of what is yours. At the same time, be a good neighbor and make it easier for others to do the same with what is theirs.

Your responsibility extends far beyond just keeping a current antivirus subscription.


The problem goes far beyond throwing stones...

The distinction is subtle.

Your operating system is irrelevant. You could run Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, the ‘nixes, or whatever else. Every useful operating system has vulnerabilities and run vulnerable applications. The user is also very often tricked into loading untrusted code either directly or delivering it within data to a vulnerable application.

Blindly fearing malware -- such as what would happen if someone were to draw parallels to Chlamydia -- does not help you to understand it. There are reasons why malware exists; there are certain things which malware is capable of; and there are certain things which malware is not.

The single biggest threat to security is complacency. Your information is valuable and you are responsible to prevent it from being exploited.  The addition of a computer does not change the fundamental problem. Use the same caution on your computer and mobile devices as you should on the phone or in person. You would not leave your credit card information on a park bench unmonitored.

Read on to understand what malware is and what it could do.

Frankenmalware, an antiviral boss fight

Tagged: fud, Malware, Virus, Worm



Be careful out there!





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Source: The Register











Source: Symantec

Apple is da bomb! Vulnerability found in battery circuitry

Subject: Editorial, General Tech | July 25, 2011 - 10:24 PM |
Tagged: Malware, apple

Okay, so the title is more joke than anything else but security researcher Charlie “Safari Charlie” Miller discovered a vulnerability in Apple devices, sort of. This exploit, which appears to not actually be a security flaw and rather just an over-permissive design, allows an attacker to gain access to your battery control using one of two static company-wide passwords. Charlie has discovered many exploits in the past several years on the OSX and iOS platforms. One of the most high profile attacks he discovered involved a data-execution vulnerability in the iPhone’s SMS handling: under certain conditions your iPhone could potentially confuse inbound text messages as code and run it with high permissions.


Malware assaults and battery charges.

(Image from Apple, modified)

So what does having the ability to write to a laptop’s battery firmware mean? Firstly, remember the old advice of “Get a virus? Reinstall your OS!”? Well assuming you actually can perform a clean install without ridiculous hacking (thanks Lion) the battery controller can simply re-infect you if the attacker knows an exploit for your version of OSX. But how does the attacker know your current version of OSX? Well if you are installing from an optical disk they just need to know a Snow Leopard RTM exploit; unless of course you extract Lion from the Mac App Store and clean install using it – assuming the attacker does not know an exploit for Lion or simply just infects the reinstall media if you created it from the infected computer. True, malware is about money so it is highly unlikely that an attacker would go for that narrow of a market of Mac users (already a narrow-enough market to begin with) but the security risk is there if for some reason you are a tempting enough target to spear-phish. Your only truely secure option is removing the battery while performing the OHHHHHHHH.

You know, while working (very temporarily) on the Queen's University Solar Vehicle project I was told that Lithium cells smell like sweet apples when they rupture. I have never experienced it but if true I find it delightfully ironic.

While that would all require knowledge of other exploits in your operating system, there is a more direct problem. If for some reason someone would like to cause damage against your Apple devices they could use this flaw to simply break your batteries. Charlie has bricked nine batteries in his testing but has not even attempted to see whether it would be possible to over-charge a battery into exploding. While it is possible to force the battery controller to create the proper conditions for an explosion there are other, physical, safe guards in place. Then again, batteries have exploded in the past often making highly entertaining Youtube videos and highly unentertaining FOX news clips.

Source: Forbes

Attackers trying bold new things to get your PC

Subject: General Tech | June 17, 2011 - 02:37 PM |
Tagged: Malware

We have been long battling online menaces that are looking to generate money off of the grief of others. It used to be simple for the attack to be successful: release virus; ???; profit. Now that worms are much less common the focus has shifted from invading a person’s computer to tricking the person to allow you in their computer or attacking the service they are accessing. Now, what was once a far-fetched joke by a popular comic strip is true: people are being contacted at home and told to infect their computer.


Your call is VERY important to us.

The story for security has always been the same: be careful what you do, keep your attack surface as small as possible, and limit the damage in the event of a breech. You need to be aware, regardless of what platform you utilize, that you are only as safe as your level of complacency. If someone is attempting to get you to do something quickly, they likely are trying to play on your complacency by distracting you with an urgency. The disappointing part is that in the heat of the moment even someone aware of these attacks could still be susceptible to them because social engineering is simply very effective.

All of the above said, the silver lining to this whole problem is that the attackers are getting substantially more desperate which means that it is only a matter of time before the pool of attackers shrinks due to lack of profitability. The problem will never go away, but as the difficulty steadily increases for the attackers (which it is, otherwise they would not be so inventive) the draw of money will seem much less luscious.

Source: HotHardware

Apple Defender: for better and for worse

Subject: Editorial, General Tech | May 25, 2011 - 09:22 PM |
Tagged: Malware, apple

Apple users have been dealing with a bad bout of malware over the last few weeks ironically called Mac Defender. Its modus operandi involves scaring the Apple user with claims of malware in a phony file browser and giving them a magical option to remove all problems. That option is actually the malware, but since the users are convinced they are downloading anti-malware they will often allow it to happen and provide their admin password. At that point, they are prompted to provide their credit card number to actually remove the now-present infection. Apple was actively quiet about the whole experience but has now gone vocal about the experience. Also, a new revision of Mac Defender just got substantially harder to avoid.

The most insecure part of your computer.
Apple received criticism recently for demanding that their technical support staff would not be able to assist customers suffering from the Mac Defender bug. That stance was apparently leading up to a recent announcement from Apple for how to remove Mac Defender and its known variants as well as a promise to release a software update which will remove and prevent clean users from installing known variants of the malware. This was then offset by the news that a more recent version of Mac Defender, known as Mac Guard, can install without requiring the input of the admin password.

It should be noted that admin password or not; Apple or not; patch or not; this form of malware strikes the most vulnerable point of any system: the user’s complacency. It does not matter how good of an antivirus solution you have, or how protected your operating system and programs are (though in many cases both of those are lacking as well) you need to be cautious about what you do with any device that accepts information that is not yours. Food for thought: software that can jailbreak an iPhone steal admin privileges from Apple and give it to you. Even in a locked down system such as an iPhone where the user does not have admin rights, what would have happened had you not been the recipient of the admin privileges?

Source: Ars Technica

Antivirus effectiveness report: Microsoft Security Essentials behind its peers

Subject: General Tech | May 4, 2011 - 05:28 PM |
Tagged: mse, Malware, antivirus

One of the major drawbacks of having general purpose computation devices is malware. Your computers are designed to manipulate and store instructions and information and they do that amazingly. Your computers, however, cannot tell who gave what instruction; they follow a set of instructions until it links to another, which they follow, ad infinitum. When someone who wants to use your computer can get their series of instructions run by your computer: that is when you got a problem.

Antivirus software is designed to detect when a bundle of bits on your computer could translate to a likely attack. The big question is how effective are each antivirus package at doing just that.
Oh is it reeaaaalllllyyy?
The firm tests antivirus software and assigns it with a score based on various factors. They recently published their findings for this quarter and found Microsoft Security Essentials was the second-least effective at preventing infections from occurring according to their scoring metric. Their report (PDF) shows that while Microsoft is effective at blocking recent malware it has difficulty with 0-day attacks.
Despite the ranking it should be noted that antivirus software should be just a guard looking over your shoulder monitoring what you do. Keep your computer and all programs on it that receive data up to date, be careful of what you run, and keep a minimum number of ports forwarded to your PC. Then and only then will an Antivirus package help protect you against what is left.
Lastly, if you happen to suspect that your computer has an infection: back up your data, reinstall your operating system, and enjoy a speedy virus-free computer. That method is free and more effective than hoping an Antivirus package reversed all the damage the virus did because you have no method of knowing otherwise.


Tagged: Virus, Malware, China, Android






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Source: DigiTimes