Rise in Malware and some Notable Cyberattacks

This week we learned how to save cash, ink, and paper by printing more efficiently, get started with Minecraft, get DreamScene animated desktops back in Windows 7, make Windows Home Server into a domain controller, found out which Firefox add-ons slow you down the most, and more.

The first three months of the year have so far witnessed a rise in malware and some notable cyberattacks, according to a report released today by Panda Security. (A PDF copy of the report is available for download, link is embedded in the article.)

Antivirus software maker Symantec said Tuesday that attacks increased some 93 percent from 2009 to 2010, with a staggering 286 million new threats reported last year alone.

Web-based attacks were up 93 percent on 2009, and you were most likely to come across a malicious Web site if you were on the hunt for pornography; 49 percent of malicious sites found through Web searches were pornographic.

Apparently, Germany is the top location in Europe when it comes to malware, phishing, botnets and other dubious activities, but the UK leads Europe as a source of malicious code.

Major browser makers are beginning to revisit how they handle Web authentication after last month’s breach that allowed a hacker to impersonate sites including Google.com, Yahoo.com, and Skype.com.

E-mails from dozens of companies–including Citibank, Chase, Capital One, American Express, Walgreens, Target, Best Buy, TiVo, TD Ameritrade, Verizon, and Ritz Carlton–began flooding inboxes this week after a company called Epsilon announced that its system had been breached.

Microsoft’s patching is going from one extreme to the other. While March had just three bulletins fixing four vulnerabilities, this week 17 bulletins are being issued, fixing 64 different vulnerabilities.

Trojans are still an effective weapon in the malware armory of cybercriminals, with the latest SQL injection attacks affecting hundreds of thousands of URLs–dubbed Lizamoon–also attempting to trick users into downloading Trojans in the form of fake antivirus programs.

There’s a new twist with some fake antivirus scareware that has cropped up. It accepts payment via SMS, according to antivirus firm CyberDefender.

According to an advisory from security services provider Secunia, the VLC Media Player is susceptible to a vulnerability in the Libmodplug library which it rates as highly critical.

The breach at RSA that could compromise the effectiveness of the firm’s two-factor authentication SecurID tokens was accomplished via phishing e-mails and an exploit for a previously unpatched Adobe Flash hole, RSA has revealed.

Federal prosecutors in New Jersey are looking into whether mobile application developers are illegally sharing personal data of their users with advertising firms, and now a security researcher may have just reinforced the the case against at least one of those involved.

Mozilla announced this past Monday that it will reabsorb Mozilla Messaging and integrate it into Mozilla Labs, a team within Mozilla that incubates experimental projects.

When Microsoft officials said in late March that “Internet Explorer 9 will not be broadly rolled out on Windows Update until the end of June,” that didn’t mean that Microsoft wouldn’t roll it out beforehand to those who weren’t testing IE9.

A small number of FaceTime users have complained of a “creepy” glitch with Apple’s FaceTime video-conferencing platform. According to a posting on the Apple discussion forums, iPhone users are seeing photos of themselves that they claim they had never taken show up on FaceTime when they try to place a video call to another user.

Windows 7, The Missing Manual is one of the most popular Windows 7 books out there. Does popular mean also good, useful & worth reading? Find out from this review.