By Andrew Brandt
After all the brouhaha surrounding the NYTimes.com website hosting ads which spawned rogue antivirus Fakealerts last weekend, I spent a considerable amount of time looking at so-called exploit kits this week. These are packages, made up of custom made Web pages (typically coded in the PHP scripting language), which perform a linchpin activity [...]
By Andrew Brandt
A new variant of the Koobface worm started striking out this week, with a twist: Where the older Koobface would steal and use the cookies saved by Internet Explorer which store social network logins in order to spread its infectious messages in the victim’s name, this new variant is pulling down a tool [...]
By Andrew Brandt
The body’s barely cold from last week’s BlizzCon, but the script kiddies who write phishing kits have been hard at work putting their best foot forward, crafting account-stealing code that targets gullible WoW players who want an early peek at the just-announced Cataclysm expansion. These Catphish pages, linked off of YouTube video postings [...]
By Andrew Brandt, Curtis Fechner, and Grayson Milbourne
Yesterday, at the opening of our BlizzCon coverage, we showed you just how commonly phishers target WoW players by posting innocuous-looking links in message board or forums frequented by players. Today, we’ve produced a really short video that shows exactly how someone infects their computer with a phishing [...]
By Curtis Fechner and Grayson Milbourne
Tomorrow morning, Blizzard Entertainment (the publisher of the wildly popular World of Warcraft franchise) will kick off another BlizzCon to show off their latest projects and directly interact with their fanbase. World of Warcraft will likely take center stage at the convention, which has become the venue of [...]
By Andrew Brandt
When the threat research analysts here at Webroot recently started seeing malware swapping out legitimate components of Windows and replacing them with malware payloads, I couldn’t help but wonder what these malware authors were thinking.
After all, cybercriminals with a lick of sense know very well that messing with system files is dangerous juju. Such an [...]
By Andrew Brandt
In the course of surfing around, looking for ways to get infected, I stumbled upon a site that offers visitors downloads of key generators, cracks, and other ways to circumvent the process used by most legitimate software companies to prevent people who didn’t pay for the software from registering or using it.
And of [...]
By Andrew Brandt
Last week, I posted a blog item that explained how gamers face a growing security threat in phishing Trojans — software that can steal the passwords to online games, or the license keys for offline games, and pass them along to far-flung criminal groups. We know why organized Internet criminals engage in these [...]
By Andrew Brandt
Since the beginning of the year, my colleagues in the Threat Research group and I have been researching an absolutely astonishing volume of phishing Trojans designed solely to steal what videogame players value most: the license keys that one would use to install copies of legitimately purchased PC games, and/or the username and [...]
By Andrew Brandt
The latest data from our customers indicate that, at least in the month of May, we were blocking and removing some of the nastiest threats on the Web. Among the spies we took out, we hit Fakealerts and Rogue Security Products hard. These spies simply try to fool you into making purchases you [...]
