The dismal situation in Syria has gained considerable sympathy in the rest of the world. Unfortunately, playing on our emotions is a typical strategy of cybercriminals. Today I received an email calling for donations to be made to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to help Syrian refugees. This mail appeared very professional Read more…
The McAfee Threats Report for the first quarter of 2013 highlighted a noteworthy increase in the number of Koobface malware samples on record. This data point is based on the number of unique malicious files associated with the Koobface family, and is generally one indicator of active malware development. Besides the number of changes made Read more…
In a previous blog McAfee Mobile Research reported on fraudulent adult dating-service applications on Google Play that target Japanese users. Many other suspicious applications are spreading on Google Play in Japan, and try to lure users to similar fraudulent sites. These suspicious applications have appeared on Google Play since May. They offer adult or nonadult Read more…
McAfee Mobile Research monitors adult one-click-fraud applications on Google Play that are targeted at Japanese users. Although the attackers appeared to have stopped uploading these apps in May, they have now resumed the attacks. We have confirmed about 600 malicious applications have been published since the beginning of April. We have also confirmed that another Read more…
Mobile devices are also increasingly being used to manage a critical and important asset for all of us: our money. According to the Federal Reserve Board report “Consumers and Mobile Financial Services 2013,” in the United States “48 percent of smartphone owners have used mobile banking in the past 12 months, up from 42 percent Read more…
Bitcoin is a virtual decentralized currency that was created in 2009 by developer Satoshi Nakamoto, who described the currency in a paper. Recently Bitcoin has gotten lots of attention. In early 2013, the prices reached a high of US$265 per Bitcoin. The following chart shows the currency’s historical price: Because Bitcoin is a virtual Read more…
One of my friends recently locked himself out of his apartment. I found this out when I called him, because while he didn’t have his keys he did have his smartphone. This was one of those times he wished he lived in one of those hotels with the Assa Abloy NFC enabled locks.
It turns out he doesn’t need to go to a hotel to open his door with a phone. Kwikset will soon be selling Kevo, a new deadbolt that can be unlocked with a bluetooth enabled phone. You can switch out your old door locks with one of these newer models
Financial theft is one of the most lucrative forms of cybercrime. Malware authors continue to deliver sophisticated tools and techniques to unlock online bank accounts. Attackers design and develop botnets to perform financial fraud, targeting banks and other institutions for profit. These botnets traditionally have monitored victims’ Internet activities and intercepted banking transactions to extract Read more…
The malicious binary behind the Travnet botnet has been updated. The new code has a new compression algorithm, steals the list of running processes, adds new file extensions to its list of files to steal, and has improved its control commands. Also, after the malware has uploaded the stolen files on its remote server, the Read more…
This past April (4/19 to 4/21) I had the great pleasure and experience of joining the Red Team at 9th NCCDC competition. It was actually my 2nd year on the Red Team and 4th year to attend in total (I judged in 2010 and 2011). McAfee is actually a perpetual Read more…