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From Dark Reading: Adobe’s Reader and Acrobat PDF applications have been hit by a new attack exploiting an unpatched vulnerability in the pervasive tools. So far the exploit has been used mostly in targeted attacks, but researchers say it could soon spread now that the cat is out of the bag. Adobe late yesterday issued [...]

From Dark Reading: Keyloggers and spyware are the most commonly occurring attacks in companies that suffer major data breaches, according to a report published today by Verizon Business. The new report, “2009 Supplemental Data Breach Investigations Report: An Anatomy of a Data Breach,” offers a look at the 15 most common security attacks and how [...]

From Taranfx: Who was that someone shouting loud that only Jailbreaking makes iPhone insecure?  We now have a new App that makes even an UnModified/Virgin iPhone leak personal data like you have never seen before. A Swiss iPhone developer has unveiled a new application that is capable of harvesting huge amounts of personal data from [...]

From ZDnet: Security researchers have stumbled upon a new piece of ransomware that blocks an infected computer from accessing the Internet until a fee is paid via SMS (text message). According CA researcher Zarestel Ferrer, the ransomware file is bundled with a program called uFast Download Manager.  Once a machine is infected, a message is [...]

From Dark Reading: Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) removed malware from more than 1.5 million machines just three days after it was updated on November’s Patch Tuesday, and the software giant has detected two new fake antivirus threats on more than 110,000 machines. The latest statistics come on the heels of Microsoft’s recently published [...]

From  Tech Republic: Roberto Suggi Liverani and Nick Freeman, security consultants with security-assessment.com have discovered that poorly-written Firefox extensions can be exploited to install malware on a victim’s computer. It seems Mozilla does not have any security requirements for extensions. That’s a problem, as their flagship Web browser Firefox implicitly trusts extension software. I first [...]

From Dark Reading: Researchers at Cisco recently got a rare glimpse of the inner workings of the botnet underworld after going undercover and meeting an actual botmaster online: the botmaster, who ran a botnet that had infected dozens of machines at a Cisco customer site, said his main job is to compromise a few thousand [...]

From Dark Reading: While pervasive, widespread malware attacks like Conficker get all the attention, there’s another generation of obscure and dangerous malware that so far is too rare to be considered a threat — but could provide a hint of things to come. A common thread among most of these unusual or odd malware samples [...]

From Dark Reading: Internet Explorer 8 detected nearly three times as many socially engineered malware links than Apple’s Safari 4 and Mozilla’s Firefox 3, according to new test results from an independent security lab. IE8 blocked 81 percent of socially engineered malware URLs — those links that appear to be legitimate in order to dupe [...]

One of the things I enjoy doing is reviewing my web logs to see how people are finding my site. Surprisingly, much of my traffic is still Conficker related. Usually it’s people looking for my Wireshark filters to detect infected computers, which indicates they still haven’t removed the threat. Here’s my good deed for the [...]