Banking and Virus Scanning with a Live CD

Last week, Brian Krebs of the Washington Post blogged here advising business owners to perform online banking using a live CD. This excellent advice (IMHO) created quite a stir over the last week. Essentially, banking on a live CD prevents you from becoming susceptible to Windows viruses, while at the same time loading a fresh, non-compromised...

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Obama Stresses Cybersecurity Awareness

"The lesson is clear, this cyberthreat is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation" (Obama). This is the message that Obama recently declared in a short video on the White House website. He makes it very clear, in the midst of cybersecurity awareness month, that all Americans need to be aware and secure in their online activities. "As consumers we use the internet to pay our bills,...

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New Zeus Scam Emails and Download Domains

There are some new Zeus emails going around that folks should be aware of. These emails, as reported by the Securosis blog, pretend to be from a system administrator. The administrator asks them to "run SSl updates procedure" as belo...

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New Twist on IRS Spam

There is a new twist on the IRS emails that have been delivering zbot and other threats over the last month. In some new emails, reports Gary Warner, the link contained in the message is to Geocities.An example from the CyberCrime & Doing Time blog:hxxp://geocities.com/FreddyCampbell36/ohuloc.htmWhile the users will ultimately end up at the commonly used http://www.irs.gov.blah.blah.co.uk/fraud_application/directory/statement.php?etc......

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Green Cloud Security Firefox Add-On Collection

Firefox recently added the ability to group collections of add-ons for easy sharing. The ISC recently published their recommended add-ons and we've followed in suit. There was a couple additional add-ons, namely FlagFox and KeyScrambler, that are also useful security add-ons. Green Cloud Security Add-Ons: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/greencloudsecur...

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Spike in Blackhat SEO: Websense Monthly Report

Websense published their monthly report, "This Month in the Threat Webscape". September saw a number of new attacks and an increase in some old ones. One of the most well known and documented problems this month was blackhat SEO poisoning with malicious results leading to rogue AV and other types of malwar...

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Comcast Monitoring Users for Malware and Botnet Activity

Comcast is beginning the launch of a new service to notify users when of compromised computers and botted machines. The service, called Comcast Constant Guard, has started an initial roll out in the Denver area....

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Web Threats Booming: APWG First Half Report

The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) released their first half "Phishing Activity Trends Report" with some startling statistics. For those that have not heard of the APWG, the organization devoted to the elimination of phishing and identity theft scams. The report gives statistics on many trends inlcuding phishing trends, rogue AV, keyloggers and others and fully reinforces the fact that the number of threats on the internet...

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Evolution....New Multi-Function Trojan

Webroot has discovered a new trojan that performs a variety of malicious tasks. One of the primary functions is to crack captchas so that forms of all types can be submitted by the attacker. The trojan will download a specific set of instructions from the internet including which sites to attack, and then operate in the background - attempting to connect to targeted sites. That is not the only concern. The trojan is also capable...

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