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Friday, June 28, 2013

Kaspersky: Phishing attacks rise;Warning also to other Issues

Category IT SecurityArticle date 27 June 2013
The number of phishing crimes being committed has risen, according to a new study released by Kaspersky.

Some 37.3 million internet users around the world were the victims of attacks in 2012-13 - up 87 per cent from the year before.

Phishing is the act of contacting a person or organisation and lying about who you are or what company you represent. Many scammers register domain names that closely match those of large corporations such as Mastercard and Sony to lull consumers into a false sense of security, before stealing valuable data.

Victims were seen to come from a number of different countries, but the population of Russia, the US, India, Vietnam and the UK were targeted by the cyber-attacks most often.

Around 56 per cent of all identified sources of phishing scams came from just ten nations, with Germany, the UK and US among those suspected of participating most often in the criminal behavior.

However, it was not just individuals that were attacked by the cyber thieves - threats against corporations also rose dramatically and nearly 20 per cent of victims did business in the financial sector - a lucrative target for skillful con-artists.

Yahoo!, Google, Amazon and Facebook were the top private sector targets but online games services including Playstation Network, Steam, Xbox live and Wii shop also suffered from substantial levels of activity.

One of the most common ways people were targeted was, ironically, by scams claiming to offer anti-virus technology products that often have keylogging or trojan horse infections built-in to log key pieces of information that can be sold on to third parties for profit.

The study released by Kaspersky concluded: "Both phishing itself and the diversity of the types of phishing attacks are experiencing rapid growth and affecting an enormous number of users and organisations around the world.

"Relative simplicity [in] setting up these types of attacks and the high probability of gaining some type of reward from a successful phishing ploy has attracted more and more malicious users to phishing."

Posted by Paul Sells
Breaking news from ihotdesk, IT Security Solutions in LondonADNFCR-8000229-ID-801605361-ADNFCR

Read more: http://www.ihotdesk.co.uk/article/801605361/Kaspersky:-Phishing-attacks-rise#ixzz2XSl4LIdP 
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source:https://news.google.com/?ar=1372378089            TECNOLOGY
Apple ID Data 
As Apple's popularity grows, so does the desire among fraudsters to make money from the people who own the company's devices. The cybercriminals are aiming to steal Apple ID data which provides access to users' personal information stored in iCloud (e.g., photographs, contacts, documents, email, etc.) as well as to the purchases made in the company's iTunes Store. Many malicious users go further and try to the steal bank card details used to pay for those purchases.
The scammers make use of phishing sites that imitate the official apple.com site. Since the beginning of 2012 until the present time this has resulted in a significant increase in the number of web antivirus detections triggered by users of our products attempting to visit such sites. During that period we have seen on average around 200,000 detections per day. By contrast, in 2011 the figure stood at around 1,000 detections per day. 
 written article/source by: Nadezhda Demidova              source:http://www.securelist.com/en/blog
Script Worm
Recent months have produced little of interest among worms written in Java and script languages such as JavaScript and VBScript. The main reason behind this was the limited proficiency of the virus writers, whose creations were anything but remarkable. However, a couple of malware samples grabbed our attention; their complexity is testimony to the fact that professionals sometimes get involved as well.
Kaspersky Lab’s products detect these special worms as Worm.JS.AutoRun and Worm.Java.AutoRun. They are also detected by heuristic methods as HEUR:Worm.Script.Generic and HEUR:Worm.Java.Generic respectively.
These two worms have three key features in common: heavy obfuscation, backdoor-type essential payloads, and similar methods of propagation. Both worms spread by copying themselves and the configuration file autorun.inf into the root folders of logical volumes of removable storage media and network disks. If these infected storages are opened on other computers, the infection can spread. Having infected the operating system and established a foothold on the victim computer, the malicious programs deploy their principal payload.
For months, the number of AutoRun worms detected on Kaspersky Lab users’ computers remained essentially unchanged. According to Kaspersky Security Network data, half of all script worms spread themselves this way. As for Java worms, this is not their usual method of propagation. However, in the last three months we have seen a dramatic rise in the number of new Worm.Java.AutoRun modifications
written artilcle and source:Konstantin Markov
Note; I am not technology expert nor technology savvy but I need to inform my readers from  whom I have believed their line of expertise from the articles/blog they have written/published.

Phl except gov't 'relatively safe' from cyber attacks

Phl except gov't 'relatively safe' from cyber attacks
 (philstar.com) | ANILA, Philippines - While the Philippines in general is safe from cyber attacks and espionage, its government and businesses remain vulnerable, a security software firm's official said.
"The Philippines seems relatively safe from major mobile malware and cyber espionage (but) attacks against government institutions and corporations are possible," Kaspersky Lab Southeast Asia Jimmy Fong said in a statement Wednesday.
Fong said that recent denial-of-service or DDOS attacks against state-owned sites are indicators that the country's government systems are still at risk.
“These attacks can be dangerous for any institution especially now that the Philippines is linked to other countries via broadband Internet connections. Security even in the virtual world is the responsibility of everyone and putting in place the best security solutions is paramount,” he said.
Credit to :https://news.google.com