Items tagged with Worms
You have to be more careful than ever when it comes to sticking things into little holes. Get your mind out of the gutter, we're obviously talking about plugging electronic gadgets into USB ports, this being HotHardware and not Hot_____ (fill in the blank). That's the word from PandaLabs, which claims that 25 percent of new worms wiggling into the wild are specifically designed to spread through USB storage devices, where they can then copy themselves to a whole host of mobile hardware, like cell phones, DVDs, MP3 players, and more. "At present, much of the malware in circulation has been designed to distribute through these devices," explains Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs. "Not...
Read more...
Just when you thought it was safe to tweet again, another Twitter worm has reared its ugly head. In case you were busy hunting for Easter eggs or biting the heads off chocolate bunnies this weekend, and didn't have a chance to tweet or read other folks' tweets on Twitter, the micro-blogging social-networking site was hit with no less than four different worms over the course of the last 48 hours or so.It all started at 2 A.M. PDT on Saturday when four-newly created accounts started spreading a worm that takes advantage of a cross-site scripting vulnerability. The worm was quickly dubbed the "StalkDaily.com" worm, because once infected, a Twitter account automatically would tweet a message promoting...
Read more...
We had all been warned: April 1 was the day that the infamous DOWNAD/Conficker worm was supposed to activate and do its dastardly deeds, whatever they might be. The day came and went without a whimper of Conficker-initiated destruction, although that didn't stop countless media outlets from reporting on it (HotHardware included). Conficker did generate 50,000 domain names and began contacting the domains--as predicted--but no damage was done to infected systems, at least as far as researchers could tell. Other than that, Conficker stayed relatively quiet... That is, until this last Tuesday night... The cyber-sleuths over at Trend Micro have been closely monitoring a Conficker-infected system,...
Read more...
It has been said that Microsoft rushed the development of Vista SP1 in order to help correct some of the stability and compatibility flaws that were keeping some large customers away from the relatively new OS. New reports from testers indicate that this rush might show itself in all new set of issues.Here's what one tester had to say:“Based on my informal tests conducted in the first hours of having Vista Service Pack 1 in hand, it's hard to draw any hard and fast conclusions. However, these mixed results do show some promise--and also show that your experience with SP1 may vary depending upon the system configuration. Our Test Center will perform further, and more in-depth, testing...
Read more...
