WARNING - This threat returns to the ways of old - IT DESTROYS DATA!

Initially perhaps conceived as a prank targeting a small community of bikers in central Slovakian region, the worm Win32/Zimuse.A and Win32/Zimuse.B has achieved worldwide notoriety. It is a type of threat that overwrites MBR (Master Boot Record) of all available drives with its own data, making the data stored on the user’s computer inaccessible. Moreover, the restoration of the corrupted data is complicated, requiring specialized software or a provider.

Since the worm’s inception, ESET has detected it on hundreds of computers of its users. Initially after the outbreak, only users in Slovakia were affected – accounting for over 90% of all infections. Presently, the greatest number of infected computers is in the United States, followed by Slovakia, Thailand and Spain, followed with Italy, Czech Republic and other European countries.

Posted by Greg Hewitt-Long in Virus & AntiVirus News at 07:02

John E. Dunn, Techworld.com

Independent memory giant Kingston Technology has issued a highly unusual warning that several of its supposedly secure encrypted USB drives can be hacked.

The precise nature of the hack has not been disclosed, but the company named three drive models, the DataTraveler BlackBox, the DataTraveler Secure - Privacy Edition, and the DataTraveler Elite - Privacy Edition, as being vulnerable to "a skilled person with the proper tools and physical access to the drives."

All of the drives use highly-secure 256-bit AES encryption, so it is likely that the vulnerability in some way allows an attacker access to the encryption key stored inside the drive, which would give free access to the data. Achieving this would be unlikely to be trivial, but exactly how non-trivial is impossible to gauge without the sort of information the company is not going to offer for fear of encouraging attacks.

Posted by Nancy Pursley in Virus & AntiVirus News at 13:57

2009 is drawing to a close, and 2010 is almost upon us. The Chinese calendar says 2010 is the Year of the Tiger, but a report released from McAfee claims it could be the year of Adobe malware.

Traditionally, the most common target for malware is Microsoft. Microsoft holds a dominant stake of the operating system, office productivity, and Web browser markets, so it's only logical that malware developers would want to fish in the pool with the most targets.

However, Mac OS X is creeping up in operating system market share and Firefox and Chrome are nibbling away at the Web browser market share, making them more attractive targets for attack as well. Adobe, with Flash and Acrobat Reader, is virtually ubiquitous across all operating system platforms and Web browsers, which makes it a one-stop-shopping target.

Posted by Nancy Pursley in Virus & AntiVirus News at 14:00

SEOUL (AFP) – Computer hackers who may be from North Korea have gained access to a secret US-South Korean plan to defend the peninsula in case of war, the defense ministry said Friday.

The hackers used an Internet Protocol address in China to access some military data related to Operation Plan 5027, a spokesman told AFP.

"Authorities are trying to find whether North Korea was involved," he said, adding the leaked data contained crucial information such as slide and power point displays explaining the plan.

OPLAN 5027 was drawn up jointly by South Korea and the US which stations 28,500 of its troops in the South. It allows for the dispatch of nearly 700,000 US troops to the peninsula should a full-scale war break out.

Posted by Nancy Pursley in Virus & AntiVirus News at 08:40