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Posted on 12/09/2004 1:19:14 PM PST by yankeedame
New Trojan poses as Lycos spam page
Correspondents in Paris
December 10, 2004
A VIRUS that spies on keystrokes and downloads passwords and bank account details is masquerading as a screensaver designed by internet portal Lycos to attack spammers, an internet security company has warned.
Finnish anti-virus company F-Secure said the so-called Trojan horse started to be distributed among emails on Monday.
The mail has the subject line "Be the first to fight spam with Lycos screen" and comes with an attachment entitled "Lycos screensaver to fight spam," F-Secure said on its website.
Whoever downloads it unwittingly installs a spying programme called Perfect Keylogger, which records the user's keystrokes to harvest personal data, such as passwords and details of bank accounts.
The Trojan horse is hooked up to an email adress in Indonesia, the British science magazine New Scientist said in a website report on Thursday.
Angered by Lycos, spammers were probably behind the attack, it said.
Lycos' screensaver - "Make Love Not Spam" - was launched in Europe on November 30.
The screensaver barraged notorious spam websites with data, in the hope of clogging up bandwidth and thus driving up their costs.
But it was scrapped just four days later amid criticism that it was adding to the problem of useless data already being carried on the internet.
Agence France-Presse
I have gotten 2 that claim to be Microsoft updates. When you scan them they contain a virus.
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The people who create these viruses should be hanged!
MicroTrend virus checker update yesterday added nearly 500 new virus/trojan/backdoor definitions.
Even people using dial-up should be running some of the prevention and spyware hunting programs.
thought you might be interested in this...
I thought Trojans were supposed to prevent viruses????
Keep your OS and other software updated, yeah, Mac, blah, blah, Linux, blah, blah-- but some of us are obliged to use MS's admittedly vulnerable stuff- so keep the system current. An up to date OS & browser are the first line of defense.
Really, really switch browsers- you have to keep IE because it's hooked into the OS, and some sites ( like MS updates! ) don't like alternatives- but honestly, with Firefox, Opera, or even Netscape, you will be amazed at how mush less garbage gets into your PC.
Consider a hardware firewall- most all home networking allows some sort of firewall; it's cheap insurance and less intrusive over a software firewall- but regardless, try it.
You have to run antivirus protection and keep it updated. Also Ad-aware, Spybot, and Spyware blaster at the minimum. And keep them updated. IE-spyad blocks over 5,000 malicious sites- give it a try.
I use Firefox PR1 and IMHO, beats the sox off MS Explorer. Life is good with tabs. Click the link and give it a try. This ping's for you. See posts #3 and #9.
Speaking fo fire walls and home networking...I've got 3, soon to be 5 computers on my home network all running the free version of Zone Alarm.So how do I set it up so that on the rare occaision that I want to transfer files from one to the other I can do it without shutting down Zone alarm?Also I'm interested in a hardware firewall how much do they cost and how well do they work?
Bump to read later
Cool, thanks.
If your machines are on the same network, they may not be affected by Zone Alarm. All your machines would be behind the firewall. Transferring between machines wouldn't be much different than transferring between hard drives, floppy drives, etc.
Unless each machine is running Zone Alarm, you shouldn't have a problem transferring files from machine to machine on the same network.
Linux is by far the best of these solutions. I am running it now, and have been for several years. To date, no viruses, and no known spyware. All that for free! I don't think it can be beaten!
I see TomGuy had some of the answer- the DSL modem here ( a Westell ) has a built-in router that has a firewall feature. Most of the new wireless LAN ( AKA local network ) routers seem to have a firewall feature built into them.
Here are some links:
http://www.iceteks.com/articles.php?act=view&cat=main&article=ethnetwork&p=1&
http://www.virtualdr.com/
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/986526/posts
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/6658
http://duxcw.com/
-and a web search will give you even more info, but the quick & easy way is to ask your local computer store what works for their customers.
Thanks
FYI
Allrighty then,...yes my router has a built in firewall, that is invisible and requires no configuration input from me, it also doesn't even blink when I add a new computer to the network.So what does it do? all I know is what it doesn't do,it doesn't block spyware, viruses or popups.It might thwart hackers but I find that difficult to believe since it doesn't even slow me down when I add a new wireless connection.The reason I ask about the new hardware firewalls is that they are advertised as being able to block spam,viruses,spyware and all sorts of nasties.
ed, you got me- if it is working correctly, it should stop most, if not all of that stuff. You might try one of the security scanning services like Symantec's or Gibson research, which will tell you if you have ports open that should not be left open. Here's a link to an overview of firewalls:
http://www.firewallguide.com/
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