Sloth:  Feeling too lazy to install security updates or patch your machine because you can’t be bothered? This leaves you wide open to infection and potential upset when your identity is stolen!

Gluttony:  Gorging yourself on internet gossip – amongst the cream cakes of celebrity pictures, there may be a dirty malware worm hiding, which could leave a nasty taste in your mouth.

Pride: “I know better than my security software” – people who turn their software off, or ignore the warnings, and proceed to sites or to download stuff anyway may be in for a nasty shock when the viruses creep in!

Lust: Just be careful what you click on. If pictures, videos or links to exciting content take your fancy, check that the site is safe or trusted before you go! Website rating services like Norton SafeWeb will give you some guidance.

Envy: So you want a designer handbag or shoes just like Cheryl Cole’s, but don’t want to pay full price?  Beware of the tricksters who will try and con you into buying  fake goods and potentially hand over your credit card details to criminals.

Greed:   Bargain sales? Two for the price of one? If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Wrath: What might happen if you succumb to all of the above? You’ll be full of wrath, as your PC could get infected, your cash could get stolen and your Halloween could prove to be a real life horror!

We continue to advise you to take a common sense approach to combating cybercrime by keeping vigilant with online security. This involves keeping an up to date browser and operating system and ensuring antivirus and firewall software is up to date with the latest definition set.

The prevalence of these rogue products has been driven, in no small part, by a multi-level marketing and distribution model. The affiliate network mechanism, that fuelled the growth in adware and spyware , a few years back, has been dusted down and reused to distribute rogue security products. Affiliates, can earn up to 30-40 pence per installation and we have evidence that, the top affiliates, could earn over £800k per annum simply by helping to distribute this stuff.

I wonder how many users of these sites have changed their passwords, just in case, today?  In my view, consumers, people like you and me, need to be wary about these things the whole time. We need to look out for scams, and it’s rare that anybody would email you for your password, so think it through before offering up this information. What this week’s events show is just how simple it can be to pull this off. It also points out that people are still woefully naive.  In my mind, this highlights that the ordinary user really needs to have a really effective anti-phishing capability, to let them be forewarned, that the site that is asking for this information is not legitimate. That would have helped ensure that people were not put in a position where they could be asked to provide this valuable information. It also shows how important using, maintaining and changing passwords is.  Again, the ordinary user needs help and assistance here. They need tools that will allow them to store individual and unique passwords, tools that help them generate strong passwords and encourages them to use them. These tools exist, but the lesson of this week must be that people need to be encouraged to go find and use them.

The Trojan, called URLZone exploits holes in the browser you are using  when you visit an infected or compromised web site. In this case the malware, a toolkit called LuckySploit, exploits a known security hole in the browser, and installs the Trojan on the computer. When the Trojan notices the computer user visiting the site of a targeted bank it springs into action. It would appear that several hundred people have had money taken from their account, with an estimate of the total take reaching $438,000.

URLZone marks the emergence of a new generation of banking Trojan horses that provide a greater threat. This is the first that hijacks a victim’s browser session, steals the money while the victim is doing online banking, and then covers its tracks by modifying information displayed to the victim, all in real time. It really does show the level of sophistication that the creators of this will go to continue to pursue their crime.  So, how can you protect yourself? Well, this type of Trojan needs to exploit your browser and if it cannot then it cannot proceed. Keep your security product, operating system and browser updated to thwart this type of attack.

The security industry has moved on from the product Microsoft is launching. Unique malware and social engineering fly under the radar of the traditional signature based technology employed by free security tools such as Microsoft’s. We believe the false sense of security provided by this tool is almost as dangerous as having no security at all.

The latest generation of internet security is real-time and reputation-based, operating in real-time and not relying on a signature being produced and downloaded before the computer is protected. The Norton 2010 range includes game-changing detection in the Quorum technology and is the fastest security suite available with a very light use of system resources.  Users, reviewers and testers will judge the success, or otherwise, of Microsoft.  From the commentary of these groups, the Beta of the Microsoft product suggested that the company needs to do a lot of catching up, to even get close to the latest paid for products on the market.

I noticed an interesting presentation coming out of the VB Conference 2009, that was held last week, that provided an interesting insight into a new malware affiliate program, discovered to be offering 43 US cents for every successfully infected Mac machine. ‘Partnernka’ is thought to be a Russian network of spam and malware affiliates that have turned their attention to the Mac platform, using socially engineered tricks to load fake codecs and scareware programs.

It is clear that the Mac community is becoming more interesting to the cyber-criminals. The fact that they are using an affiliate model, that they are prepared to pay to get their rogues applications successfully distributed, shows the level of interest they are prepared to bring.  An unwelcome development for the Mac community.

The prospect of getting money back from the Tax-man is so attractive, that I fear that many people may fall for this scam. The email looks very legitimate, the scammers have found it easy to replicate the simple format of the HMRC online look and feel. So, as ever, the old advice holds true: if it looks too good to be true, it is probably a scam.

At this time of year, we do tend to see a number of tax related themed scams. There is one that it doing the rounds in the US at the moment, wherein, a user receives an email from the ‘IRS’ and is asked to download a copy of their tax return to review it. However, the file that they download contains the Zeus Trojan that harvests financial and personal data and also turns the PC into a bot.

Oh well, I had better get back to filing my return, no doubt paying them extra money and not the other way round.

We have just releases today a report that identifies the ‘Dirtiest Web sites of Summer 2009’, the 100 sites with the most threats detected by the site rating service Norton Safe Web, as of August 2009. These sites represent the ‘worst of the worst’, based on the number of threats detected by Norton Safe Web.

It comes as no surprise that 48% of the sites are ones that feature adult content. However, the remainder cover the gamut of subject matter. Viruses are the most common threats to be found, followed by security risks and browser exploits. Simply, visiting one of these sites, without downloading or clicking on anything in particular, could put you at risk of exposing your computer to infection, and worse, put your identity, personal and financial information into the hands of cybercriminals.

What makes these sites so dirty? It is just the sheer number of threats to be found on them. Norton Safe Web has found that the average number of threats per malicious site is 23. Compare that with the average number of threats from the Dirtiest Web Sites list – a staggering 18,000 per site! What we also found is that 75% of these sites had been ‘dirty’ for over 6 months.

To find the dirt, Norton Safe Web crawls the Web and performs analysis of millions of Web sites, and benefits from a network of more than 20 million Norton Community Watch members that automatically submit suspicious URLs for analysis in real-time.  Norton Safe Web analyzes websites using signature-based file scanning, intrusion detection engines, behavioral detection and install/uninstall analysis to identify security risks including phishing sites, malicious downloads, browser exploits and links to unsafe external sites.  In other words – dirty stuff you don’t want on your computer.

The headlines have been grabbed, as it seems to be about anything, by Twitter. We have seen it pose both as a victim and as an unwitting perpetrator. Two weeks ago, we saw Twitter come under a DDOS attack, that resulted in the being taken down for a short period of time. The working supposition being that it was launched, as an attempt, to quieten a pro-Georgian blogger who has been critical of Russia. Today, I have came across this article that provides some additional insight into last year’s cyber attacks that brought internet traffic to a standstill in Georgia. It suggest, that in part, the attacks were carried out by civilians and Russian crime gangs. What was particularly interesting, is the belief that civilians were recruited into the attempt to over-power Georgian web sites, and that they were recruited using social networking sites.

Moving on from this, the last few days have seen stories of how Twitter was now being used as a command and control channel for a Botnet. Symantec security response were quickly onto this and have covered it in some depth here. This marks an interesting moment. The use of Twitter, in this manner, is at the same time both elegantly simple and worrisome. That being said, now we have seen and understood it, we can start to think about how we can counter this.

Finally, the past weeks have seen the resurgence of Koobface and I wrote on this a few weeks back.  Koobface is an anagram of Facebook and is a worm that targets users of social networking sites. More often than not it will then attempt to download a range of misleading and useless application and then get the user to pay for them.

Is it me, or do you see a pattern? The world of social networking represents a whole new (business) opportunity for the cyber-criminal. A whole new set of battle lines are being drawn, with the bad guys on one side, being faced down on the other side, by the site owners/operators and the security industry.

LimeWire and other P2P services need very careful setup when they are first installed, since the default setting is to share all of the information on the hard drive. As this case demonstrates, overlooking that then can leave your PC open to prying eyes.