Internet Security Online

Researchers from Microsoft’s anti-malware engineering team are working on an automated way to sort through the thousands of malware families and variants attacking Windows computers.

The company unveiled its plans at the EICAR (European Institute for Computer Anti-Virus Research) conference in Hamburg, Germany, proposing the use of distance measure and machine learning technologies to come up with automatic classification of viruses, Trojans, spyware, rootkits and other malicious software programs.

Just 3 out of 100 Internet users are able to sniff out sites ready to drop spyware or adware onto their computers, security company McAfee said Wednesday.

In an online quiz run by McAfee’s recently-acquired SiteAdvisor, a service that alerts users of possible spyware- and adware-infecting sites via search results at Google, Yahoo, and MSN, 97 percent of more than 14,000 consumers were fooled by one or more malicious sites.

I found the opening scene to the 1991 movie sequel, Terminator 2, to be one of the most powerful SciFi film openings ever. There’s a massive firestorm, chunky metal warriors waging war against humans, and then the camera zooms into a metal robot foot crushing a human skull. It’s very graphic. The world has been taken over by terminator robots, first created by man and now bent on destroying us. It’s Skynet. What interested me most about this SciFi classic was how real and plausible this future could be, understanding the dark side of human nature that creates evil and some people’s inherent need to cause harm.

Harvard researcher Ben Edelman on Tuesday released a report tying Yahoo Inc. to adware vendors that he claimed were displaying pop-up advertising that appeared to commit click fraud.

The online report, “The Spyware — Click-Fraud Connection — and Yahoo’s Role Revisited,” traces what appears to be click fraud that starts with the adware vendor and eventually leads to Yahoo. In between are online marketing companies that sell advertising.

New Definitions:
========================
Adware.Henbang
WareOut

Updated Definitions:
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180Solutions +1
404search
ABetterInternet.Aurora +3
Adintelligence.AproposToolbar +9
Adware.Look2Me +12
Adware.ZenoSearch
AlfaCleaner
Alset
Coulomb Dialer
DealHelper
Dialer
e2give
ErrorSafe +3
eUniverse
GetMiraR
Lop +14
Malware.SpywareStrike
Purityscan +3
SCBAR
SpyAxe +2
SpywareNo +2
Tracking cookie
WebHancer
Win32.Trojan.Downloader +11
Win32.Trojan.Mirc +3
Win32.TrojanDownloader.Qoologic +2
WinFixer +3
Virtumonde +2
Zango

The MD5 checksum for the defs.ref file is 88ba24f7b36c3f3fb5ee88617db856dc

SAN FRANCISCO - A pioneer of software that delivers pop-up ads based on Web sites that Internet users browse said Tuesday it will exit that business by June following persistent criticism from online publishers, consumer groups and privacy advocates.

Claria Corp. had said last summer it was phasing out its adware business in favor of new personalization services, but it did not commit to a timeline or promise to drop such ads entirely. Tuesday’s announcement is the first such commitment.