UK Justice Minister Jack Straw’s Account Used for 419 Scam

UK Justice Secretary Jack Straw had his web based email account compromised last Thursday. Jack Straw, former Home Secretary used a Hotmail account as his sole public email address.

Figure 1. Jack Straw’s contact information from http://www.jackstrawmp.org.uk/contactus.asp In a variation of a theme currently being used on social networking sites, 419 scammers used the [...]

Rogue Facebook App Linked to Blackhat SEO

Over the weekend, an application of extremely dubious intent was released on Facebook. Called “The Error Check System“, this said application appears to be non-destructive, but spread very quickly and very widely and could in the process have collected thousands, hundreds of thousands even, of personal details. The application sent out notifications to Facebook [...]

Another Exploit, This Time On MS Excel

Cybercriminals are actively taking advantage of another vulnerability, this time in Microsoft Office Excel. This is the third threat in less than two weeks that featured exploits. Exploit codes on IE7 and PDF bugs were discovered last week and earlier this week respectively. Microsoft acknowledges the Excel vulnerability in a recent bulletin. The software [...]

New DOWNAD/CONFICKER Variant Already Detected

There have been some concerns over whether another new Conficker variant (DOWNAD for Trend Micro) has been released or not. Recall that in January, we have witnessed cybercriminals update WORM_DOWNAD.A’s routines to include being able to propagate via more channels to become WORM_DOWNAD.AD. Reports talk of yet more updated functionalities in a more recent Conficker [...]

Sneaky New Virus Spreads via Ads

Hackers infiltrated popular tech business site eWeek.com yesterday using Google’s DoubleClick banner ads as a vehicle. Websense caught the malicious coding and published its results, which spurred eWeek to scour its code and remove all phony advertisements.

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