It’s not necessarily a gloomy outlook for URL-shortening services like TinyURL and SnipURL. In my previous post I explored the possibility that these services might be used, or might already have been used, by scammers to disguise a malicious link. The fear is that as they get more popular, and users unthinkingly click on them, … Read more
Phishing emails don’t need to be sophisticated to lure the unwary. Indeed, there’s some evidence those behind the more convincing looking emails masquerading as bank emails are also behind a spate of key-logging trojans, which use basic methods to fool the recipient into making them active. Australian Daniel McNamara of anti-phishing website Code Fish has … Read more
Was the recent virus war just between kids, or something more sinister? Mi2g, the British Internet security consultants, reckon not. “Upon analysing the juvenile dialogue between the malware writers of NetSky, Bagle and MyDoom it has been prematurely concluded by a range of commentators that this is a turf war between teenagers or college students seeking global notoriety. Whilst script … Read more
I don’t know whether this is new or not, but I ain’t seen it before. Could virus senders be making use of a new social engineering tweak? The problem, it seems to me is that a lot of anti-virus manufacturers and system administrators insist on including automated alerts which supposedly inform users when their email … Read more
More on who’s behind the latest wave of virus attacks. Mary Landesman of About.com looks at text strings contained in the viruses of Bagle (sometimes Bagel) and MyDoom to show how ”a battle is waging between three groups of virus writers, each attempting to prove superiority over the other.” It’s a very good piece. But it’s … Read more