Macs Hit by Backdoor Attack

Apple antivirus company Intego has discovered a backdoor malware attack targeting Mac users.Able to infect both PowerPC and newer Intel-based Macs thanks to being written as a universal binary, OSX.HellRTS.D sArtwork: Chip Taylorets out to take complete control of an infected machine, setting itself up as a server capable of doing pretty much what it wants. This will include, downloading software, spewing email, set up screen sharing, accessing files on the Mac, and copying anything it finds on the clipboard.The company describes...

Norton Internet Security 2011 Beta Handles New Threats

Computerworld - As protections against garden-variety viruses and malware have become more effective, malware writers have turned to new ways to infect computers in the pursuit of profit. Two increasing threats are malware spread via bad Facebook links and so-called scareware -- malware that masquerades as virus-scanning software. The main screen of Norton Internet Security 2011. The beta of Norton Internet Security...

Diary of a Mad McAfee Antivirus Victim

As if McAfee's bad antivirus update last week wasn't bad enough, some customers were none too happy with how the security vendor's tech support handled the situation either.David Hellen, an independent contractor for the U.S. Navy who heads his own SAP configuration business, says last Wednesday when he noticed that his Dell Latitude running Windows XP wouldn't boot straight into Windows, he knew he had to try and figure out what was going on. He saw news stories about the McAfee antivirus update snafu, which involved the faulty...

McAfee's Mea Culpa for Update Error

McAfee apologized late Thursday for crippling thousands of customers' computers with a flawed update the day before."I want to apologize on behalf of McAfee and say that we're extremely sorry for any impact the faulty signature update file may have caused you and your organizations," said Barry McPherson, executive vice president of support and customer service, in a post to the company's blog near midnight yesterday.It was the first apology by a McAfee executive for the fiasco, which started early Wednesday when an antivirus...

Symantec Warns of Cyber Attacks Worse Than Love Bug

A decade after the Love Bug virus attacked millions of computers worldwide and put the Philippines in the IT world map in a negative way, computer security experts have noticed that today's computer attacks are more malicious than the original computer security threat.In its April 2010 security report, Symantec said it has detected 36,208 unique strains of malware that were designed to carry out targeted attacks.MessageLabs, which was acquired by Symantec later, was the first one to raise the alert on the Love Bug virus, which...