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World of Warcraft denizens are complaining that an anti-virus update published by Symantec over the weekend falsely labelled a component of the game as potentially malign. Instead of throwing spells or wielding axes, fans of the role-playing game who choose Symantec for their security protection complain that the firms is listing benign scan.dll.new library as an information stealer. Multiple posts on a WoW forum suggest that the problem is far from isolated. We asked Symantec if it could shed any light on the situation on Monday lunchtime, but have yet to hear back. There's been a rash of false positives...

When my computer attempts updates, I get the Error Code 8000FFFF. It means that registry values are blocking all updates. There is a Fix It link for this but I am so skeptical because I do not understand how to correct such problems. If you have had this problem and have downloaded the fix for this, can you let me know if it fixes this on its own?

A flawed McAfee antivirus update sent enterprise administrators scrambling today as the new signatures quarantined a crucial Windows system file, crippling an unknown number of Windows XP computers, according to messages on the company's support forum. The forum has since gone offline.

Miscreants have created a Trojan that poses as a Google Chrome extension. Spammed messages attempt to dupe prospective marks into trying an add-on that "helps you better organise your documents received in your email". Interested parties are pointed towards a counterfeit Google Chrome Extensions page, which offers a malware executable. More observant punters will notice that the download is offered in an .exe file and not a .crx Google Chrome extension. Such markers are easily missed, however. The Trojan horse malware on offer (identified by Romanian security firm BitDefender as the Agent-20577) blocks access to Google and Yahoo webpages. Attempts...

Many PC problems can be very frustrating to find and fix Microsoft has launched "Fix It" software that keeps an eye on a PC and automatically repairs common faults. The software basically adds the automatic diagnostics system in Windows 7 to older versions of Microsoft's operating system. The software, currently available as a trial or beta version, is intended for users of Windows XP and Vista. The package also tries to anticipate how security updates will affect a PC before they are installed. Bug watch Once installed, the software gets updates about known issues with Windows or any connected devices,...

Just days after Google researcher Tavis Ormandy released details on a dangerous new Java vulnerability, malicious hackers have pounced and are exploiting the flaw in the wild to launch drive-by download attacks. Virus hunters have spotted the attacks on a popular song lyrics Web site.  Any visitor to that Web site with the Java Plugin for Browsers installed (Internet Explorer or Firefox) will get infected with malware.According to AVG’s Roger Thompson, the attacks are likely to spread because of the simplicity in launching a successful exploit:The code involved is really simple, and that makes it easy to copy, so it’s not...

Summary Trojan:Win32/Alureon.A is a data-stealing trojan. This trojan allows an attacker to intercept incoming and outgoing Internet traffic in order to gather confidential information such as user names, passwords, and credit card data. Trojan:Win32/Alureon.A may also allow an attacker to transmit malicious data to the infected computer. The trojan may modify DNS settings on the host computer to enable the attacker to perform these tasks. Therefore it may be necessary to reconfigure DNS settings after Trojan:Win32/Alureon.A is removed from the computer. Microsoft MalWare Protection Center has more info.

An Israeli hacker has created an exploit for the IE zero-day flaw that Microsoft warned about on Tuesday, and the code is already being inserted into the Metasploit Framework. According to Ryan Naraine, it took only a rather revealing blog post on the McAfee Labs blog to set Moshe Ben Abu's mind and fingers in motion. Following their information that the attack originates from the domain topix21century.com, it took him just "a few minutes of digging in that host to find the exploit,” which he then proceeded to de-obfuscate and discover the vulnerability it takes advantage of. Mitigation techniques have...

A public exploit for the new security hole in Internet Explorer 6 and 7 has now become available – as a module for the Metasploit exploit framework. Since it's likely that other websites will soon begin to actively exploit the hole, this will probably force Microsoft to promptly release a patch. Microsoft had previously only registered a few targeted attacks exploiting the hole in the iepeers.dll component to infect systems. Microsoft said therefore that it would continue to monitor the situation and recommended that users switch to Internet Explorer 8, which is not vulnerable. At the recent RSA conference, the creator of Metasploit, H.D....

The software that shows to which extent the battery is charged through the Energizer DUO USB recharger comes bundled up with a Trojan, says US CERT. The installer file for the software drops one file too many - the file Arucer.dll is placed into the Windows system32 directory, and allows unauthorized remote access to the system via the TCP port 7777. Through it, it can download further (malicious) files, send stolen files from the infected computer and execute programs. The Trojan springs to like every time Windows starts and is active even when the charger is removed. By deinstalling the...

A top Microsoft executive on Tuesday suggested a broad Internet tax to help defray the costs associated with computer security breaches and vast Internet attacks, according to reports. Speaking at a security conference in San Francisco, Microsoft Vice President for Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney pitched the Web usage fee as one way to subsidize efforts to combat emerging cyber threats -- a costly venture, he said, but one that had vast community benefits. "You could say it's a public safety issue and do it with general taxation," Charney noted. Ultimately, Charney was only offering one suggestion during the RSA security...

Authorities have smashed one of the world's biggest networks of virus-infected computers. It was a data vacuum that stole credit cards and online banking credentials from as many as 12.7 million poisoned PCs. The "botnet" of infected computers included PCs inside more than half of the Fortune 1,000 companies. More than 40 major banks were infiltrated, according to investigators. Spanish investigators, working with private computer-security firms, have arrested the three alleged ringleaders of the so-called Mariposa botnet...

News of a newly discovered bug in VBScript and Windows Help files in Internet Explorer that could allow a remote attacker to run an arbitrary command has reached Microsoft on Friday and they immediately sat down to investigate the matter. After two days, they confirmed that this vulnerability "could allow an attacker to host a maliciously crafted web page and run arbitrary code if they could convince a user to visit the web page and then get them to press the F1 key in response to a pop up dialog box", but that there has been no news about attacks...

Microsoft’s online Windows Live estate was hit by a major server shutdown for about an hour yesterday, after some users of the service complained that they could see other people’s accounts. “As some of you may have noticed (we heard from you on Twitter!) we had an issue with the Windows Live ID service between 9 and 10AM PST this morning,” admitted Microsoft’s Arthur De Haan yesterday. “Due to the failure of one server, Windows Live ID logins were failing for some customers, and this increased the load on our remaining servers. We took the problematic server offline and brought...

The presence of a hard-to-detect rootkit may have caused Windows XP machines to freeze up after applying a patch from Microsoft last week, according to preliminary analysis of the problem from Microsoft's security team. Microsoft's users forums filled up with reports of Windows XP users experiencing the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) after applying the 13 patches released by Redmond last week. The problem was later linked to one specific update - MS10-015 - a patch for an "important" kernel flaw - and it was discovered that uninstalling this package unfroze affected machines. The Blue Screen problem affected a...

Researchers have discovered a new banking trojan that is being used to steal the financial credentials of bank customers. The "Bugat" trojan, discovered by SecureWorks researchers in January, has capabilities similar to the notorious data-stealing trojans Clampi and Zeus, according to Jason Milletary, security researcher with SecureWorks' Counter Threat Unit (CTU). The malware monitors an infected user's web browsing activity and searches for the URLs of more than a dozen financial institutions, Milletary said. When a user accesses one of the targeted URLs, the trojan captures account credentials and sends them back to the criminal's remote server. Milletary could not...

"Tuesday's security updates from Microsoft have crippled Windows XP PCs with the notorious Blue Screen of Death, users have reported on the company's support forum. Complaints began early yesterday, and gained momentum throughout the day. 'I updated 11 Windows XP updates today and restarted my PC like it asked me to,' said a user identified as 'tansenroy' who kicked off a growing support thread: 'From then on, Windows cannot restart again! It is stopping at the blue screen with the following message: 'A problem has been detected and Windows has been shutdown to prevent damage to your computer.' Others joined...

HELP! I AM LOGGED ON and I cant find the source of random e-mails that I am supposed to be sending. The message I keep getting is: This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification. Delivery to the following recipients failed. 179586@corp.ds.fedex.com it is from pastmaster@corp.ds.fedex.com

Applying the latest patches from Microsoft can cause Windows XP machines to crash with the infamous blue screen of death. Updating systems with the MS10-015 bulletin, which addresses "important" vulnerabilities in Windows Kernel, can cause machines to lock up when restarted before falling into a never-ending reboot loop. The problem is far from isolated, judging by a growing thread on the topic on an official Windows support forum here - though it's fortunately not commonplace either. Restarting affected systems in Safe Mode reportedly doesn't seem to help. Suggested fixes for the problem involve booting from a Windows CD or DVD...

A SurfRight report shows statistics that give credibility to the lately popular opinion that one anti-virus solution is no longer enough to be sure your computer isn't infected. The effectiveness of most anti-virus solutions relies still on the quality of the virus signatures, and sometimes on the heuristics capabilities of the programs. Aided by its partners, SurfRight had the idea of bundling up 7 anti-virus engines that have at their disposal an equal amount of anti-virus databases. They called it Hitman Pro 3. The statistics that they presented regard a little over 100,000 users that have run their anti-virus solution...