Blog.Ivacy.com

SJ2000 writes

“Windows Explorer was quarantined last week by Kaspersky Lab’s antivirus software after being falsely identified as malicious code. The security company’s systems had decided that a virus called Huhk-C was present in the explorer.exe file, leading to its confinement or, in some cases, deletion. The bug was only live in the wild for two hours, and ended up affecting just one corporate customer and a handful of home users.”

Security vendor F-Secure noted the announcement by Nikolay Patrushev, head of the Russian FSB (Federal Security Agency). Patrushev said federal sites fought off 1.4 million attacks this year. Also, Patrushev noted the pending trial of the authors of the Trojan creator, Pinch. Only the names of Russian citizens Ermishkin and Farhutdinov have been publicized as those behind Pinch.

“The financial losses due to Pinch infections can hardly be calculated,” F-Secure said. It has been estimated that malware created with Pinch in turn has infected millions of PCs. News of another scam connected to criminals in Russia, and in the Ukraine, involved fourteen people in The Netherlands who acted as mules for money laundering. The Channel Register said fake ABN Amro websites in Hong Kong stole credentials from bank customers.

Those credentials enabled the thefts to take place. The report cited prosecutors as noting the accused collaborators who muled the money “were generously renumerated” by the criminals.

Via SecurityProNews.

The Handbook of Applied Cryptography is now available online — legitimately. This is a good book, and well worth downloading.

via Schneier on security