Bitdefender Safego The New Social Network Protection

Posts on your wall, comments from friends, status updates. These are the tools that help you build your online social interactions. But don’t forget that your online social life relies on a crucial ingredient: your friends’ trust in you. So why let infected links, spam or deftly crafted scams step in and spoil your fun? After all, we’ve all had enough of the “see who viewed your profile” tricks and of its countless siblings.

 

Using in-the-cloud scanning, Bitdefender Safego protects your social network account from all sorts of e-trouble: scams, spam, malware and private data exposure. But, most importantly, Safego keeps your online friends safe and …close.

 

 

To install the app Click Here

Citi iPhone banking app contains security flaw

iPhone-owning customers of Citigroup have been urged to update their mobile banking app immediately because of a security flaw that secretly stored account numbers, bill payments and security access codes in a hidden file.

 

The Citi Mobile app allows customers to check their account balances, transfer funds and pay bills from their iPhone, and is one of the most popular finance applications in the Apple App Store with approximately 120,000 users since it was launched in March 2009.

 

Citigroup told the Wall Street Journal that it had “no reason to believe that our customers’ personal information has been accessed or used inappropriately by anyone.”

 

 

However, there will undoubtedly be concerns that if users lost their iPhone the information could be accessed by an identity thief. Furthermore, it is believed that the sensitive data could also have been backed-up to customers’ Windows and Mac computers when they are synchronised with the iPhone. Certainly, there are many more chances for the typical malicious hacker to access information stored on a PC than on the controlled environment of an Apple iPhone.

 

 

Read More…

 

SYMBOS_FLOCK.I – Where Does It Come From?

Yesterday we blogged about a new piece of Symbian malware, which we detected as SYMBOS_FLOCK.I. This malware targets users of older Series 60 devices.

 

Overall, the malware itself is very simple in its operation. It first prompts the user to install an application called ZvirOK 5.2!. The name here suggested there are previous versions of this malware in existence (that, or it took the malware writer at least 5 attempts to get it right). Alternatively, the malware author wanted us to think that this is a legitimate application, and added the version number to make it appear as such.

 

Another interesting fact here is that the word Zvirok (Зверёк) roughly translates from Russian as “small animal”, which can sometimes be used as a nickname—indicating that this malware is of Russian origin. However, the Symbian Installer package (the .SIS file) specified the language of the application as PRC Chinese, which leads to confusion from where this malware really came from.

 

After installation, the malware executes a very simple Python script which uses some of Nokia Python libraries to send an SMS containing the text mumym xxx joker90 to the number 7205. The number 7205 is what is known as an SMS Short Code, a special shortened phone number for SMS or MMS messages that is normally used for competitions and marketing and can often be quite expensive to use. The malware does not spread itself in any way.

The number of digits in SMS shortcodes varies from country to country – for example in the US it is normally 5 or 6 digits, whereas in the UK it is fixed at 5 digits and begins with either a 6 or 8. Unfortunately both China and Russia both use 4 digit SMS shortcodes – so there is no further hint here on the origin of this malware.

 

The last clue perhaps is in the SMS content itself. Its highly likely that the phrase Joker90 refers to a particular model of scooter from Honda. Perhaps this SMS shortcode is used to enter a competion to win one of these scooters. If that is the case, I’m leaning towards China as the source of this malware, as scooters are more popular in China than in Russia, generally speaking.

 

Regardless of the source however, this will not be the last of these types of malware that we see in the future. Creating these malware is fairly trivial, and there is also a modest amount of money to be made. It is doubtful that any major cybercriminal will be packing up their botnets and moving to mobile malware anytime soon, but it continues to be used as an introduction to crime for the attackers on the first steps of the cybercrime ladder.

 

Sophos iPhone app – free download now available

Sophos has launched its first application for the Apple iPhone – designed to give you a better view of the security threats that are out there, with live hourly updates direct from SophosLabs.

 

The app, which also runs on the iPod Touch and the iPad, allows you to access Sophos information when you’re on the move or away from your desk, and includes the following supa-dupa features:

 

Threat Spotlight Experts from our labs detail some of the most interesting threats that they have analysed in the last week, explaining who is at risk, details of the attack and how to avoid becoming a victim.

 

Latest threats A dynamic list of the latest top ten threats analysed by the experts in SophosLabs, providing detailed information on their prevalence and a helpful link to further details on the Sophos website.

Stats Sexy graphs to bamboozle your boss with – showing in technicolour pie charts the latest stats for top email attachment malware attacks, spam and web-based threats.

 

Maps Now this is funky. Your iPhone will show you a world map, allowing you to view not just the latest email, spam and web attacks – but where they have been spotted around the world. You can even zoom in on particular countries, and view the subject lines of spams being sent around the globe.

 

Info Links to our blogs, our latest threat report, and loads of other good stuff.

 

So, what are you waiting for? Grab it from the Apple App Store now, or search for “Sophos” in the iTunes App Store.

 

We’re very interested in getting feedback as to what you think of this Sophos app. So please do leave us a rating and a review on iTunes, as it will help us decide if we should develop it further.

 

Also, if you have the time, why not quickly fill in the following survey to tell us what you’d like to see next from the Sophos Security Threat Monitor app?

 

By Graham Cluley, Sophos