Malware

Over the last couple of years, spyware has grown from being a nuisance into being an epidemic. Although many tools exist for fighting spyware, they largely focus on the recovery of infected systems and have been mostly ineffective in the war against spyware. A few weeks ago however, Microsoft unveiled the first beta of their own anti spyware solution. Although this software is capable of disinfecting an infected system, its primary goal is to prevent the initial infection. In this article, I will explain how this software works and share my initial impressions of it with you.

So your computer has a virus, a Trojan, or one of the other growing range of pests, what do you do?

In the final installment of this article series we get to see the trojan operate at the packet level itself. No matter how clever the exploit, or trojan it must still dial home as it were. It will do so at the packet level, which we will examine.

In part two if this article is where we begin to get some answers. Much like the fabled trojan horse contained soldiers who opened the gates of Troy our supposed ASM is not what it appears to be.

All exploits or malware leverage a specific weak link in a program. This is done through various means. Social engineering on the other hand exploits the human link. What though if both an exploit and social engineering were combined? Read on to find out how both worlds collide.

Viruses are largely a threat that is contained if one has an anti-virus solution. This begs the question of what then is the next big threat in terms of malware code? The answer to that would be the new, and more lethal worms such as Slammer for one. What would happen though if someone with coding talent were to harness the chaotic world of the worm?

Spyware has reached epidemic proportions and is only getting worse. I have seen recent statistics indicating that approximately 95% of the world’s PCs are infected with spyware. Unfortunately, removal techniques that worked just a couple of months ago are no longer effective in many cases and new types of spyware being released are more advanced than most computer viruses. In this article, I will discuss why the spyware problem has gotten so out of hand and more importantly, what you can do about it.

The recent MyDoom Worm successfully infected enough victims in order to shut down SCO's web site, followed by new variants that targeted Microsoft's web site. This paper isn't intended to discuss the motives of the author, instead it will help you understand how worms enter your network, how you can block them before they even reach your internal network, and how to act in case they get in.

This article will focus on the applications that are installed on your network and home computers, which many security professionals and organizations do not know exist. These applications run in a discrete background operation and function as a spy reporting on user activity and habits that are recorded in day to day use of the computer system.

A Trojan horse is a program in which malicious or harmful code is contained inside apparently harmless programming or data in such a way that it can gain control and do its chosen form of damage, such as erasing the data on your hard drive. A Trojan can cause massive harm to you and your systems and worse yet, may turn your system into a killing machine as well! Lets look at Back Orifice specifically so we can highlight why a tool like this can get ugly if installed on your systems.