Tag Archives: Conficker

New Research: IT Pros Sound Off On 2010 Security Concerns

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Research from the enterprise security experts at Webroot

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With the explosion of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook in 2009, it’s no surprise cybercriminals have set their sights on these Web sites for new victims. Facebook now has over 400 million active users and Twitter has over six million — a sizeable pool of potential targets.

These new threats are a cause of great concern for IT managers and businesses. Webroot recently surveyed over 800 IT professionals in the US, UK and Australia, at companies ranging from 100 to 500 people in size, to learn what are their biggest concerns for 2010. Eighty percent of those who responded anticipate Web 2.0-based malware threats will be among their biggest challenges, and 73% said these types of malware are much harder to manage than email-based threats.

Many IT admins reported they thought their organizations were sufficiently protected, but that wasn’t always the case: Significant numbers reported attacks from viruses (60%), spyware (57%), phishing attacks (47%), hacking attacks (35%), and SQL injections of their Web sites (32%). What’s more, because malicious hackers have a financial motive, individuals who possess sensitive business data are perfect targets. Increasingly, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) come under attack because they are less likely to have the multpile layers of protection that larger enterprises do.

Data breaches, when they happen, can be devastating to SMBs: According the the FBI, blended Web and email attacks led to approximately $100 million in attempted losses last year. SMBs can take precautions to make sure they aren’t a part of these staggering statistics. It is important to keep up with the latest threat vectors by using a security service with URL filtering, end user policy management and virus protection, and by making sure employees are educated on know to avoid threats in a growing landscape — especially when it comes to social media.

Webroot will address this topic in greater depth when our CTO Gerhard Eschelbeck delivers a Web security trend report at the RSA Conference 2010 Wednesday, March 3, at 4:30 p.m. PST in the Briefing Center on the Expo Hall floor. We’ll continue the conversation at Infosec Wednesday, April 28 at 3:20 p.m. GMT in Earls Court when Eschelbeck  presents Securing the Internet for a Web 2.0 Collaborative Culture.

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A Look Back at the Worst Infections of 2009

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By Andrew Brandt

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It’s not clear whether the past year will go down in history as a particularly bad year for malware, but one thing is certain: It was bad enough, at times, that fighting infections and cleaning PCs took priority over virtually all other work. Neither home users nor businesses were immune from wave after wave of increasingly nasty malware tricks, though there were a few bright spots: A fix issued by Microsoft mid-year meant that worms are far less likely to be able to spread using portable storage like thumbdrives or digital photo frames; A corresponding dropoff in overall worm detections has borne out the effectiveness of that update. And the social engineering tricks employed by malware gangs are, at least for the moment, repetitive enough that they’ve become fairly easy to identify. What follows is Webroot’s list of the five most egregious examples of malicious software that, even if some of them didn’t initially appear in 2009, progressed to serious threats throughout the past year.

Worm-Koobface

Also ringing in the new year with 2009, the Koobface worm has now become the most serious threat facing users of social networks. Initially targeting users of Facebook, the worm — actually a complex, well-coordinated combination of malicious applications, each of which is designed to carry out specific tasks — continues to circulate within more than a dozen social networks. Koobface also brought to the fore the utility of social engineering (through PT Barnum-esque trickery) as a means for malware to propagate itself, not just infect an initial victim’s PC. Koobface almost represents its own branch on the family tree of malware, a malicious organism that can be used to distribute any number of undesirable files to an infected computer. The success of Koobface, and its continued development and improvement throughout 2009, shows no sign of abating into next year.

Trojan-Backdoor-Zbot

With Koobface highlighting the effectiveness of social engineering, others have joined the bandwagon. The second half of 2009 showed how trickery could lead to infections even with keyloggers as mature as Zbot, which has been seen in the wild in various forms since 2006. However, 2009 saw Zbot infections on the rise, as one or more malware gangs crafted coordinated spam campaigns that fooled recipients into believing that the messages’ legitimate origin were banks, or government organizations (both in the US and elsewhere), trade groups, or financial institutions, or even Microsoft itself. The A-list organizations spoofed by these campaigns read like a Fortune 100 who’s who list: Visa International, the IRS (and its UK counterpart the HMRC), DHL, FedEx, Chase, Bank of America, the US Postal Service, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, just to name a few. These spam messages, leading to fairly sophisticated fake Web pages, were put together with one goal in mind: To convince potential victims to download and execute the Trojan horse installer themselves. These campaigns show no sign of letup, and it’s not hard to foresee more of the same continuing into 2010.

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Someone Confick-rolled the Internet

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By Andrew Brandt

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Well, the big Conficker.c launch day is upon us and…nothing. So far, anyway. Someone should start selling “I blogged about Conficker and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” shirts. Cafepress, are you listening?

We’ve been keeping to the back of the room about Conficker, not joining the rising hysteria chorus. It’s not that we don’t care, but I’ll tell you why we’re not making a lot of noise: Webroot’s malware removal solution effectively deals with Conficker on PCs. That’s it. As long as you’ve got the File System Shield and the Execution Shield enabled in your application (click the Shields button on the left side of the Webroot Antivirus/Internet Security Essentials window, and look for a little picture of a shield next to those labels in the Windows System Shields category), and definitions updated as long as two months ago, we’ve got your PC’s back.

The only people who need to be concerned about this worm are people with no legitimate malware protection — and no, a copy of the rogue application Antivirus 2008/2009/2010 doesn’t count — and who haven’t checked in with Windows Update since last fall. And even those people only need to worry about the worm’s code attaching itself to their PC. As far as we know, that’s the only thing it’s good at. Oh yes, and pranking the computer security community and the world’s press.

So, since we’re mentioning it, now would be a good time to head over to Microsoft and check to make sure you have those updates you so sorely are missing. And if you have a copy of our product, click the Options button, then the Update tab, and make sure you have both the latest definitions files and the latest version of the application. If you need either, or both, it’ll only take a few seconds on a broadband connection to pull them down.

Then you can get back to life, and stop worrying about whether Conficker is going to destroy the world, kick your cat, and push a baby stroller into the street — or fizzle like a wet firecracker.