German police on Friday arrested two men: an 18-year old man in Rotenburg in connection with the Sasser worm, and a 21-year old who confessed to creating a bot called Agobot or Phatbot. A lot of folk believe the gang responsible for the Sasser worm may also be responsible for the Netsky worms, which have… Read More »
Just how bad was Sasser? Here’s a list, courtesy of F-Secure, of places and companies affected by the worm: County hospital in Lund, Sweden (5000 computers and X-ray equipment offline) European Commission in Brussels (1200 machines offline) Coastguard in UK (19 regional offices offline) British Airways in UK (flights delayed) Westpac Bank in Australia (offices… 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 »
First email, then biotech? Are our technologies hostage to the few? Good piece from the MIT Technology Review on spam. Apart from the stuff we know — that hackers have created computer worms and viruses that break into computers and then turn those compromised machines into launching pads for spam — there are some other… Read More »
Here’s evidence that ‘phishing’ – the art of conning users into handing over banking and other passwords by fake, but convincing-looking emails and website — may have branched out into viruses and worms. Symantec, McAfee and Sophos have published details of a new virus/trojan called Stawin (also known, because the anti virus people don’t seem… Read More »