Journey Systems, LLC - Tech Newsletter

Journey Systems Tech News and Information Newsletter. Our monthly newsletter is a free resource with all of the important things that you the end user needs to know, about how to maintain and keep your computer systems healthy.

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.:Malware - Definition

Malware or malicious software is software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owner's informed consent . It is a portmanteau of the words "malicious" and "software". The expression is a general term used by computer professionals to mean a variety of forms of hostile, intrusive, or annoying software or program code.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware

.:Featured Article - MALWARE :.

What is Malware and why should I be concerned?
Unlike Spyware, Malware is a little more serious in its intensions.

Malware can include computer viruses, worms , trojan horses , spyware , adware , and other malicious and unwanted software. Its intent is to damage your system. It can be a simple program thats only goal is to write garbage data to your machine and disrupt system files so they do not run effectively. In some cases the motive is for profit.

In the last couple of years it has been designed to take control of users' computers for black-market exploitation.
From Wikipedia "Infected zombie computers" are used to send email spam , to host contraband data such as child pornography, or to engage in distributed denial-of-service attacks as a form of extortion".

To be the most effective they must mulitiply.

Infectious!
Viruses and Worms are infectious. They can spread from computer to computer. A virus usually needs you to launch it in some way form or fashion to start its nasty work, whether it is from and email, or a document that someone sends in an email. I am sure you have been told before, Never open documents from people you do not know. TRUE, however sometimes a friend will send you something that is infected, and they do know know they are infected. So keeping a good virus scanner in place is key to protecting yourself. As mentioned before we use AVG by Grisoft. We have used other products, but when they failed to do their jobs we researched and found AVG to be an effective tool.

America's Spam Shame

by: David Utter
Staff Writer - Security Pro News

About forty-five percent of the spam sent out to infest inboxes worldwide comes from a US-based machine.

Bot-infested PCs throughout the United States are responsible for the continuous flood of spam hitting email users everywhere. Even with the rise in spam coming from China, Russia, and Brazil, none are close to matching what comes out of American computers. ...Full Story

If you are not concerned then you might as well hand your credit cards over to a perfect stranger right now. Because that is what is going to end up happening to you anyway and worse.

Cybercrime is on the rise, and there are some sneeky programs just waiting to steal YOUR identity.

New Drive-By Exploit Threatens IE
by David Utter - Security Pro News

Versions 6 and 7 of Internet Explorer running on fully patched Windows XP SP2 systems are vulnerable to a silent exploit.

McAfee researcher Craig Schmugar has disclosed the existence of attack code that can hit a Windows system when a person simply visits a malicious website.
Security researchers had discovered discussion of the exploit in an online forum. Since that time, the company has received a sample of malicious code that demonstrates the exploit can be targeted.

The company assigned this exploit a low risk to users, and explained how it works. By visiting a website containing malformed ANI files, Internet Explorer pulls them in and runs them.

Once they run, the malformed ANI can pull in other software, silently, from remote servers. An example of this silent attack demonstrated how it could retrieve a new downloader Trojan and place it on the victim's PC.

Since this exploit happens as a drive-by and runs silently, the user is not alerted to anything wrong on the system. Once exploited, common malware like keyloggers and spam engines could end up running on someone's machine.

Schmugar said Windows XP SP0 and SP1 are not affected by the exploit. Neither is Firefox . He also referred to a two-year old Microsoft bulletin where Windows was critically vulnerable to cursor and icon format handling, as this new exploit exhibits similar behaviors. Full Story Here.

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