Privacy, Hacking and Virus Alerts

"Looking at these massive samples of malware, we can’t help [but] think that there’s something brewing in Russia."

Cyber tricksters are luring curious users to open a malicious attachment by promising nude photos of celebrity beauties. Instead of pictures, they get a Trojan downloader.

The massive Storm worm attack has built a botnet of 1.7 million computers — large enough to unleash a highly damaging denial-of-service attack, researchers fear.

Storm worm authors are blasting the Internet with two types of attacks, and both are aimed at building up their botnet.

You might want to think twice before opening that e-greeting card sent to you via e-mail.

In the past week, two fake video postings have been set up on YouTube to infect users with a Trojan that includes pop-up porn ads, Secure Computing warns.

4,500-plus travel sites in Italy attacked in which stolen customer data is sent to a server in Chicago.

Thursday likely marked the largest proliferation of e-mail virus attacks in more than a year, according to security company Postini.

"These zombie computers could have brought the Web to its knees, and while the resilience of the root servers should be commended, more needs to be done to tackle the root of the problem – the lax attitude of some users towards IT security," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "Society is almost totally reliant on the Internet for day-to-day communication — it’s ironic that the people who depend on the Web may have been the ones whose computers were secretly trying to bring it down."

Computer virus writers started to use raging European storms on Friday to attack thousands of computers in an unusual real-time assault, head of research at Finnish data security firm F-Secure told Reuters.