People who get their regular dose of news from the New York Times website were recently told to be careful when browsing through the said site as malicious advertisements—also known as “malvertisements”—are found on its pages and are displaying pop-up windows that falsely report malware infections on their systems. As reported in detail by Trend Micro researcher Rik Ferguson in the Counter Measures blog, the New York Times issued warnings through both Twitter and its website's front page about malvertisements that trigger the ...

No one is absolutely safe from Influenza H1N1, not even world leaders. This is the scenario painted by cybercriminals in their latest spam run. The spammed message informs recipients that the President of Peru, Alan Gabriel Ludwig García Pérez, and other attendees of the delegation of UNASUR (Union of South American Nations) summit have confirmed cases of Swine flu. Furthermore, it states that the presidents of Brazil and Bolivia were also both infected but are now recovering. Figure 1. Sample spam Written in ...

The California bush fires that destroyed 50 homes and 10 commercial buildings and claimed the lives of two firefighters have become the focus of cybercriminals' latest social engineering ploy. Users looking for information about the fires in Auburn on the Web with search terms like “auburn fire map” are met by results that point to malware-ridden sites hosting rogue antivirus products such as: http://california-fire-map.{BLOCKED}angocafe.com/ http://california-fires-map.{BLOCKED}angocafe.com/ http://california-fires-map.{BLOCKED}lifepromotion.com/ http://auburn-ca-fire-map.{BLOCKED}lifepromotion.com/ As if that is not alarming enough, Trend Micro Research Project Manager Ivan Macalintal also noted that there are other cybercriminal ...

Tartu, Estonia is the hometown of an Internet company that, from the outside, looks just like any other legitimate Internet service provider (ISP). On its website (see Figure 1), the company lists services such as hosting and advertising. According to publicly available information, it posted more than US$5 million in revenue and had more than 50 employees in 2007. In reality, however, this company has been serving as the operational headquarters of a large cybercrime network since 2005. From its ...

Today's Patch Tuesday from Microsoft comes with 9 security advisories, 5 of which are tagged as critical, 4 as important. Collectively, 19 flaws are addressed in these advisories, 15 of which are critical. This set of advisories also includes the bulletin that addresses the previously exploited Microsoft Office Web Components bug. The critical advisories include patches for vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office Web Components (MS09-043), Remote Desktop Connection (MS09-044), Internet Name Service (MS09-039), Windows Media File Processing (MS09-038), and Active Template library ...