Yearly Archives: 2008
Microsoft plugs 28 security holes – zero-day vulnerability still unpatched
Microsoft released 8 security bulletins on the last Patch Tuesday this year. The available updates close 28 security holes in the products from Redmond. Some critical vulnerabilites affect the surface rendering library GDI, where having an exploit WMF graphic on … Continue reading
Help us to help you
You all receive this kind of messages from Windows kindly asking you to tell that you’ve had a problem with an application which refused to function. Even if this is very nerve-wasting sometimes, it actually helps a lot. Microsoft cooperates … Continue reading
Prepare for Black Tuesday
Microsoft announced its Patch Tuesday for December today. They want to release eight security bulletins, of which six are marked as solving critical security vilnerabilities in Windows operating systems, Word, Excel, Visual Basic and Internet Explorer. Two vulnerabilites considered important … Continue reading
Cryptors for sale, full service included
The underground economy is a strange place. Sometimes you stumble over offers which sound really good – from the malware writer’s point of view. Recently we got aware of a german site selling a so called cryptor which should make … Continue reading
A Christmas present in your Inbox
It seems that the spammers have a quite busy time during the winter holidays. They flood our inboxes with all kind of special “Christmas” offers covering especially potency pills , brand bags, luxury watches and different other presents. The Avira … Continue reading
Phishing on the rise
The Spamtraps used by Avira to collect spam, phishing and malware from Internet, recorded some interesting data which show us a change in the trends for the end of this year. As can be seen in the graphics below, there … Continue reading
AMTSO – First documents published
In January 2008 representatives of Avira and more than 40 other security software technologists, testers, academics and reviewers came together to found the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO) in Bilbao, Spain. The motivation for the foundation of AMTSO was helping … Continue reading
Phishing: Chase eBay
Since yesterday we’re monitoring a weird development. Usually, the top phishing targets are eBay and Paypal. But now, phishing-sites for the Chase bank are spreading very fast. There were spam runs with emails which are claiming that the Chase bank … Continue reading
Microsoft Windows, Firefox 3 Update and Spam
The developers from the Mozilla project just released an update for Firefox 3, bumping the version number to 3.0.4. The patch remedies 11 vulnerabilities of which 4 are considered crititcal by the Mozilla developers. They may lead to execution of … Continue reading
Providing protection against malware and phishing URLs
Phishing, spam and malware have a couple of things in common: they have become a major problem for the users, for the banks and for online businesses. They are delivered either as attachments or via URLs contained in the emails. … Continue reading