Spyware

The Dutch telecommunications regulator OPTA has fined the two companies behind the DollarRevenue adware program €1 million (US$1. Executives of the firms were fined up to €300,000 each, and their companies also received fines of €200,00 to €300,000. In the summer of 2006, OPTA ordered the companies to cease updating the software or face a fine. The payouts reflect the size of e-commerce spending in each region, and therefore the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns, said Molenaar. Users who attempted to open the files were infected with the spyware instead of gaining access to the goods advertised. More Spyware News

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clipped from www.f-secure.com Red Cross money mule recruitment Money mule recruitment is getting more and more blatant. We just ran across a spam run that uses Red Cross as the lure to recruit people for money laundering.

clipped from blog.searchles.com Ode to the Net: “T’was the Ny.te b4 Xmas 2.0″ Twas the night before Christmas And all through the net The good people were chatting They’d never actually met

Dutch telecommunications watchdog OPTA has fined three companies and their two directors a total of one million euros (about 1.44 million U.S. dollars) for the illegal distribution of "adware" and "spyware," local newspaper Financiele Dagbl ...

U.S. consumers were scammed out of roughly $3.2 billion over the past year from phishing scams, a significant increase over last year, according to a survey released this week. The estimate, produced by Stamford, Conn.-based research firm Gartner Inc., was based on a survey of 4,500 online adults. The findings indicate that despite a great deal of media attention to the phishing epidemic, the ...

Trojan.Qhost.WU is a new deceptive method used to push rogue anti-spyware programs. Trojan.Qhost.WU is a malicious trojan that hijacks Google Adsense by modifying your computer's Hosts file. Once you click on the fake Google ads, you're redirected to a rogue anti-spyware website where your computer is exposed to more dangerous code being downloaded. The best way to check on whether you're infected with Trojan.Qhost.WU is to follow this command: Start -> Run -> cmd, add ping -t pagead2.googlesyndication.com. The results will start, for example, "Pinging pagead.l.google.com [6x.xxx.xxx.xxx] with 32 bytes of data:". The x's represent digits. If the first digit is a 6, you're computer is not infected with Trojan.Qhost.WU. If the first digit is a 9, you're infected with Trojan.Qhost.WU.

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clipped from news.bitdefender.com BitDefender Lab’s Top 10 Malware List for 2007 BUCHAREST, Romania – December 18, 2007 – BitDefender?, a global provider of award-winning antivirus software and data security solutions, announced today that the Peed bot – aka “Storm Worm” aka “Nuwar” – was number one on the BitDefender Top 10 malware list for 2007. According to BitDefender Labs, the spread of the Peed bot has placed it higher that the prolific category of trojan downloaders by almost 10 percent overall, at 33.94 percent of total detections in the past twelve months.

Trojan.Win32 is a family of Trojan programs that usually get into your system bundled with fake video codecs or through browser security exploits. To this family belong such Trojan programs as Trojan.Win32.Gorshok.a , Trojan.Win32.LinkReplacer, Trojan.Win32.Obfuscated.gx and others. Usually, various rogue anti-spyware applications install Trojan.Win32 to popup fake warning messages that look similar to real Windows alerts, in order trick users into buying the full version of the rogue anti-spyware program. The fake alerts may look as the following: "Critical System Error! Your browser was infected by Trojan.Win32.Gorshok.a", "Your browser was infected by Trojan.Win32.Obfuscated.gx" etc. Once you click on any of these fake warning messages, you will be directed to IEDefender's home site where you will be confused and tricked into buying the commercial version of IEDefender. In addition, Trojan.Win32 may cause system instabilities, thus we recommend the immediate removal of Trojan.Win32.

BitDefender nabs a new Trojan commandeering Host files to deliver third-party advertising instead of Google's.