By Joris Evers

New software that hides on mobile phones and captures call logs and text messages is being sold as a way to monitor kids and spouses. But one security company calls it a Trojan horse.

The FlexiSpy application captures call logs, text messages and mobile Internet activity, among other things. The software, released at the beginning of March, sells for US$49.95 and is advertised by Bangkok, Thailand-based Vervata as a tool to monitor kids and unfaithful spouses. The data captured is sent to Vervata's servers and is accessible to customers via a special Web site.

Similar surveillance software for PCs already exists and has raised the ire of groups fighting domestic violence, who fear it may be used by abusive spouses.

FlexiSpy has attracted a different kind of criticism from security company F-Secure, which has labelled the software a Trojan, or a malicious program that disguises itself as something innocuous.

"This application installs itself without any kind of indication as to what it is," Jarno Niemela wrote on the Finnish antivirus maker's corporate blog Wednesday. "And when it is installed on the phone, it completely hides itself from the user."

Posted by Spencer Cuffe in Virus & AntiVirus News at 08:57

By David Pogue

GOOD thing people don't judge me by my e-mail in-box. If they did, they'd conclude that I'm sickly, overweight and unemployed, that I need a new mortgage, don't know where to buy medicine and can't please my wife.

My e-mail address must be on every junk e-mail list on five continents. It appears in every online article (pogue@nytimes.com), so I'm a gold mine for the automated software robots that spammers use to harvest e-mail addresses from the Web.

Now, most e-mail programs (Outlook, Entourage and so on) have built-in spam filters. Unfortunately, they're no match for the spammers' constantly evolving efforts to disguise their messages as legitimate mail — for example, by using idiotic spellings for words like mortgage, Viagra and Cialis.

Posted by Spencer Cuffe in Virus & AntiVirus News at 09:29

By Wolfgang Gruener

Glendale (CA) - Anti-virus specialist Panda Software today said that newly found versions of the Bagle worm use rootkits to hide its activities on an infected computer. The firm expects that rootkits may become a widely used tool for cyber criminals in the near future.

According to Panda, the Bagle versions carrying rootkits are Bagle HX, Bagle HY and Bagle HZ. Using a rootkit approach, which typically are designed to hide objects, such as processes, files or Windows Registry entries, are trying to "download files from different Internet addresses" and to "disable a large number of services belonging to security tools, such as antivirus and firewall programs, among others."

Posted by Spencer Cuffe in Virus & AntiVirus News at 09:27

By theitshield.com

A dangerous Trojan spying on your computer while connecting to a remote attacker is a threat big enough, in itself. What if the same malice has peer-to-peer creeping ability too?!

Security experts at MicroWorld Technologies inform that ‘Trojan.Win32.Inject.t’ or ‘W32/Inject-H’ is a new peer-to peer worm with IRC backdoor Trojan capacities. ‘Inject.t’ can run in the background of a computer by working as a Server that allows a hacker to control the system via IRC channels.

Exploiting Windows vulnerabilities, this worm will proliferate in networks. First it copies itself into a shared folder on the local machine. From there, the P2P network takes over to contact other computers in the network and helps them download and execute the infected file.

MicroWorld experts observe that it even mimics network protocol of specific file-sharing networks by responding to file requests and distributes the infected component across the network.

Posted by Spencer Cuffe in Virus & AntiVirus News at 09:26