Tag Archives: Virus Lab

SimplLocker does what its name suggests: Simply locks your phone!

A new Android mobile Trojan called Simplocker has emerged from a rather shady Russian forum, encrypting files for ransom. AVAST detects the Trojan as Android:Simplocker, avast! Mobile Security and avast! Mobile Premium users can breathe a sigh of relief; we protect from it! The Trojan was discovered on an underground Russian forum by security researchers […]

Black marketed Windows banking & POS Trojan Minerva turns in-the-wild

The path from the creation of malicious program to its delivery onto victims’ computers is long nowadays and involves many different players with the same goal – to make a financial gain. Malware authors usually offer their software to cyber criminals who in turn distribute it via underground forums. This is the how they keep their […]

Black marketed Windows banking & POS Trojan Minerva turns in-the-wild

The path from the creation of malicious program to its delivery onto victims’ computers is long nowadays and involves many different players with the same goal – to make a financial gain. Malware authors usually offer their software to cyber criminals who in turn distribute it via underground forums. This is the how they keep their […]

Beware, soccer fans: Not all apps are team players, some shoot for more!

The world cup in Brazil is just two weeks away, are you in the soccer spirit? The AVAST mobile malware team and I have tournament fever and have been downloading games and other soccer related apps from the Google Play store. We unfortunately noticed that some of the fun apps we downloaded weren’t as entertaining […]

Browser Ransomware Attacks are Massive in Scale

avast! Virus Lab infographic shows how prolific and wide-spread Browser Ransomware attacks have been over the last three months. During December I wrote about the tricks and tactics of Browser Ransomware. Browser Ransomware is malware that works in different types of browsers to prevent people from using their PCs. To get access back to their […]

WordPress vulnerability puts mobile visitors at risk

Today one of our colleagues came into our office and said, “Hey guys, I’ve been infected.” I thought to myself, yeah, how bad can this be? After a bit of digging we found the results were worth it; it turned out to be a really “interesting ” case of mobile redirected threats localized for each […]

Behind the CARO conference’s curtains: Meet AVAST speakers!

For seven years, the CARO Workshop has been hosted in Europe. It is an outstanding technical meeting, attended by some of the best malware researchers in the world. In 2014, the CARO workshop comes to America. ~CARO’s conference official website We are proud and happy to introduce you to our AVAST speakers and Security Experts […]

Declaring machine war against malicious Android packages

Do you know the notion “machine war”? If you’re a fan of the Matrix movie trilogy then probably, yes. It denotes the fictional rise of artificially intelligent machines against the human race and their violent conquest of human beings. We want to apply a similar dominance of computationally powerful machines, not to create a population […]

Email with subject “FW:Bank docs” leads to information theft

In this blogpost we will look deep into a spam campaign, where unlike other possible scenarios, the victim is infected by opening and running an email attachment. In the beginning of this year, we blogged about a spam campaign with a different spam message – a fake email from the popular WhatsApp messenger. This time […]

The Gray-zone of malware detection in Android OS

Does the title of this blog post have a mysterious meaning? Not exactly. In this first part about the gray-zone of Android malware detections, I will introduce the Android:SecApk, a detection regarding the protection that the App Shield (Bangcle) offers to Android applications (.apk). This detection has a big sample set that is still growing. […]