Guest guest Posted December 17, 2004 Report Share Posted December 17, 2004 The article below was written by Jeremy Muncy of Security Pro News. Be careful of some electronic Christmas Cards. ********************************************************************************\ **** Another seasonal mass-mailing worm that poses as a holiday e-card is being distributed by virus writers. The new holiday worm is being called Atak.H. Mikko Hypponen, director of antivirus research for F-Secure has stated " There are different levels of risk with these e-mail Christmas cards. It's very similar to past ones we've seen. There's little risk in sending Christmas cards, but there is in opening them. We recommend people to send old-school Christmas cards because there's no security risk in that. " The worm, which was discovered Wednesday, contains the subject line " Merry X-Mas! " or " Happy New Year! " The body of the text reads: " Happy New year and wish you good luck on next year. " Some odd occurrences with the new email are it doesn't contain a Trojan horse, a tool that virus writers use to take remote control of computers. Hypponen has said that is very strange. Another is that it is very similar to the Zafi worm, by the way it sends itself to everyone in the victims address book, but unlike the multilingual Zafi, Atak is only sent in English. Microsoft Patches Making The Holidays Better For Network Administrators. Five patches were released this week to fix nine security issues with the Windows operating system. No critical patches were released, sure to make most IT people happy. Stephen Toulouse, a security program manager in Microsoft's security response center said " All the flaws have something about them that makes it more difficult for an attacker to exploit them. " The latest five patches in December mark the last scheduled ones for this year. If Microsoft doesn't release anymore within the remainder of the month, it will have released 45 patches this year, down from 51 in 2003. Could Virus Authors Be Going After Desktop Search? Some security experts are starting to warn that virus writers could be going after the increasingly popular desktop search. " Desktop search products are very efficient at harvesting data, so it wouldn't be surprising if exploits are sought by malicious coders. Any software that can index and capture data on a user's PC will be subject to virus and Trojan exploits. It is just a matter of time, " Foad Fadaghi, senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan Australia said. According to Neil Campbell, the national security manager of IT services company Dimension Data, it's unlikely that virus writers will start targeting the new tools immediately, that's only because they aren't common enough yet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted December 17, 2004 Report Share Posted December 17, 2004 Thanks for the heads up... Carol Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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