Got this from our security team today

[superdave1984]

I think it's from Yahoo, but if this is legit it's a really bad dog.

"Careto" is the name of "a sophisticated suite of tools for compromising computers and collecting a wealth of information from them," reports The Washington Post.
This malware is frighteningly sophisticated, and we don't know who created it

Here's how it works.

It sends out emails designed to look as though they were sent legitimately from news sources like The Guardian and others. A population of people end up clicking on a link that takes them to a shady site that scans their computer for vulnerabilities. It works against Windows, OS X and Linux systems, and there may be iOS and Android versions on the way.

Once infected, a computer surrenders pretty much any info the malware wants. It can collect "network traffic, keystrokes, Skype conversations, analyze Wi-Fi traffic, PGP keys, fetch all information from Nokia devices, screen captures and monitor all file operations."

And lest you need a reminder, no one knows where it came from.

If you want to dig into the nitty-gritty of it all, Kaspersky Labs released this extensive report on Careto that gets into a lot of the scarier technical details.
http://www.securelist.com/en/downloads/vlpdfs/unveilingthemask_v1.0.pdf

 

[office politics]

browser and machine security is critical to prevent these attacks. update windows, internet browsers, and other software. lower internet browser security. do not logon to windows as a admin user.

 

[S4ndm4n]

browser and machine security is critical to prevent these attacks. update windows, internet browsers, and other software. lower internet browser security. do not logon to windows as a admin user.

What do you mean by browser security? I've always been a Firefox fan although I'm not certain that's a great option. I avoid internet explorer because of the active x controls. I use malwarebytes for AV and utilize the tools that came with it for registry cleaning and startup speed up. I've noticed I still get a few pop ups. Is there something I should add to my systems to secure them better?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[office politics]

i do not know firefox too well so I can't comment on it. I had other people tell me its a memory hog. I've started using chrome a while back because i thought it loaded pages faster than IE. I'm liking Chrome less now after I added a number of extensions or plugins to it. It too becomes a memory hog when adding this new stuff. However, I still like to use it for Reddit Enhancement Suite. My default browser is set to IE again. You could goto internet Options > Security and change the security level for certain zones. Higher Security level can prevent the activex control from running. The higher security level may break websites trying to load on your machine. Enabling uAC is another way to prevent bad software from installing on your pc.

 

[Yevrag35]

Like office said, any browser you load with add-ins is going to get bogged down eventually. I just prefer Firefox because of "NoScript". I run that in conjunction with AdBlock-Plus.

 

[PP Mguire]

browser and machine security is critical to prevent these attacks. update windows, internet browsers, and other software. lower internet browser security. do not logon to windows as a admin user.

More so common sense. IMO if you're not smart enough to realize the email is bogus then maybe you need to learn a lesson (not you, just people in general). That's just how I see it. I can't even count how many times I've looked just at an email subject without clicking and say "ha, BOGUS" and delete it.

 

[GLaDOS]

Like office said, any browser you load with add-ins is going to get bogged down eventually. I just prefer Firefox because of "NoScript". I run that in conjunction with AdBlock-Plus.

+1 that's the perfect setup.

Edit: I can't decide if this is better or worse than Cryptolocker. At least with Cryptolocker you know you're infected...

 

[acerinpa]

Question - since on this subject. If your running the browser on private settings - "incognito" in Chrome, or " private window" in Firefox, and I think there is one in IE as well. Does that automatically prevent scripts, etc. or not?

 

[carnageX]

Question - since on this subject. If your running the browser on private settings - "incognito" in Chrome, or " private window" in Firefox, and I think there is one in IE as well. Does that automatically prevent scripts, etc. or not?

Like warpro said, no. Incognito/private browsing just doesn't store cookies/history.

If you want to block scrips, then use what warpro suggested or get NoScript for FireFox. Haven't found an equivalent for Chrome yet.

 

[PP Mguire]

If you want to play with shady things, do it in a VM lol.