Two men were arrested on suspicion of using a computer virus to steal personal information and leak it onto the Internet and then defrauding people of money by offering to resecure the data. This is the first arrest in the nation in a case of fraud using a computer virus, and it is only the…
Category: Malware
Oops! IBM Hands Out Malware On USB Sticks
Stephanie Hoffman reports: BM booth attendees at the AusCERT conference on Australia’s Gold Coast received more than just a complimentary USB stick after it was found Friday that the token gifts were infected malware. IBM broke the news to AusCERT delegates in an e-mail, alerting them that the USB sticks the company handed out at…
Hacked US Treasury websites serve visitors malware
Dan Goodin reports: Websites operated by the US Treasury Department are redirecting visitors to websites that attempt to install malware on their PCs, a security researcher warned on Monday. The infection buries an invisible iframe in bep.treas.gov, moneyfactory.gov, and bep.gov that invokes malicious scripts from grepad.com, Roger Thompson, chief research officer of AVG Technologies, told…
Texas man set to admit building botnet-for-hire
Robert McMillan reports: A Mesquite, Texas, man is set to plead guilty to training his 22,000-PC botnet on a local ISP — just to show off its firepower to a potential customer. David Anthony Edwards will plead guilty to charges that he and another man, Thomas James Frederick Smith, built a custom botnet, called Nettick,…
Pub Looking Into Credit Card ‘Processing Error’
Hailee Lampert reports: An investigation is under way following several incidents of credit card fraud. Louisville Metro Police told WLKY the U.S. Secret Service is investigating this case. The Secret Service said as a matter of policy, they do not comment on open cases, even to confirm there is one. An owner of O’Shea’s Irish…
Cyberattack on Google Said to Hit Password System
John Markoff reports: Ever since Google disclosed in January that Internet intruders had stolen information from its computers, the exact nature and extent of the theft has been a closely guarded company secret. But a person with direct knowledge of the investigation now says that the losses included one of Google’s crown jewels, a password…