Tag: WORM

With jobs being hard to come by these days, you need to get creative in order to land that dream gig. We wouldn't recommend this path to everybody, but Chris Putnam earned a job at Facebook by creating a worm that made users' profiles look like a MySpace page. In 2005, Putnam, along with his friends Marcel Laverdet and Kyle Stoneman, wrote the XSS-based worm, which spread every time an ...

An awe-inspiringly complex piece of malware named 'Stuxnet' has some security experts openly wondering whether or not it's the most sophisticated worm ever to hit the planet. Others are speculating that it may be used to target a nuclear plant in Iran. Although the worm originally popped up in June, when it attacked Windows PCs operating industrial control systems, cyber experts are only now ...

The security experts over at Sophos have just unearthed a new clickjacking scam making its way around Facebook, and, if you fall prey to it, you might end up losing some cash. This latest scam looks similar to a previous worm that spread throughout Facebook by tricking users into "liking" malicious pages. Instead of exploiting the "like" button, though, this new "sharejack" scam relies on the ...

Share The latest worm to squirm its way around Facebook, like most, lures in its users by taking advantage of a temptation that's become fundamentally human: the 'like' button. The virus hit the social network over the holiday weekend, and, according to Sophos, has already victimized hundreds of thousands of users. Fortunately, though, it's pretty easy to tell which of your friends has fallen ...

Good rule of thumb when browsing the Internet: If it looks lurid, promises nudity, or displays scantily clad women, don't click on it. For some reason or another, many out there haven't yet figured this out and have helped to spread around Facebook a nasty worm that tells users to "Click Da' Button" if they "Wanna C Somthin' HOT." Of course, some men, being the hapless idiots that so many of ...

There are plenty of malicious programs that can do plenty of nasty things to plenty of computers, but, far and away, the most common type of attack results in what is known as a zombie. A zombie is a hijacked computer that can be remote-controlled by the attacker and made to do his or her bidding. According to a recent study by security firm McAffee, there were 50-percent more zombie computers ...

Spring break is here, and, apparently, Twitter had a little too much fun over the weekend, waking up with a couple of nasty bugs. Thankfully, if the pieces of malware that made the Twitter rounds this weekend were STDs, they would be crabs -- annoying, but curable, and not particularly dangerous. The first attack came Saturday, originating with a couple of accounts specifically created to spread ...

We've covered plenty of posts on rogue botnets, which are collections of virus-infected computers that hackers use to fulfill their evil whims, usually by unleashing denial of service attacks on sites they don't like. These compromised computers are often referred to as zombies. Now, with cell phones getting smarter and more capable, the belief is that it won't be long before hackers have fleets ...

Back in October we reported on a virus by the name of Koobface, a nasty trickster that appeared in the form of messages pointing to supposedly racy videos. Click the link in the message and you'd be directed to download a new video player, which was in actuality the virus, itself, quickly taking over your profile and spreading to your friends. Koobface is sadly still around, now in its 28th ...

Oh that Conficker virus, it just won't go away. Despite its authors having a bounty placed on their heads by Microsoft, the thing is still spreading, updating itself, and becoming even more prevalent. That spells bad news for Southwest Airlines, discovered Mike Wood, a security expert at SophosLabs. In a recent SophosLabs corporate blog post, he explained that millions of computers infected ...

We've had no shortage of reports about worms lately, with the Conficker virus making its way into the core of computers around the world, spreading fear and hate, and even grounding a few planes along its way. Today, though, we present a story about a very different type of worm: a real, live, earthworm. Well, it was alive, before being killed by the heat inside a man's laptop. Experiencing ...

As if the threat of the Conficker hanging over our heads weren't enough, now we've got the second coming of the Storm Worm, called Waledec, to watch out for. Waldec spreads via e-mails claiming to have a Valentine's Day greeting for you. Clicking on the link contained in the message takes you to a page containing dozens of hearts with the message "guess which one is for you? Clicking on any of ...

What is Conficker? Conficker, also known as Downadup or Kido, is the latest super virus to spread around the Internet and has security experts in a panic. When last we checked, about a week ago, Conficker had already spread to 9 million PCs, with little sign of slowing. Now it has infected at least 10 million PCs and experts believe there may be up to 350 million vulnerable computers out there. ...

Remember this nasty worm with multiple-personality disorder we reported on last week? Well, apparently, it is still spreading, and is now responsible for an estimated nine million infected computers! So far it hasn't done anything especially nasty, beyond finding its way onto machines, but that doesn't mean you want it lurking on yours! Security experts at F-Secure believe the piece of malware ...

Have you updated your Windows machine lately? If not, as always, you certainly should! Word is coming from a number of virus and malicious software experts that a certain piece of nasty software with a number of names has gone on to infect three million Windows machines around the world, with the most infected being in places like China, Brazil, Russia, and India. The software is known as ...