Malware

Microsoft has filed a lawsuit against a company that allegedly delivered spam over instant messenger, known as "spim," to thousands of its 320 million Windows Live Messenger users.

One in six consumers has responded to a message they suspected was spam, according to a survey released on Thursday by the nonprofit Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group. Of the consumers who responded to spam, most did so by mistake, but 12 percent were interested in buying the product offered, and six percent just "wanted to see what would happen." In addition, nearly 80 percent of respondents doubted their computer was ever at risk of becoming part of a botnet. — AM

The Koobface worm, which previously had mainly affected MySpace and Facebook, is now infiltrating Twitter, Kaspersky Lab researchers said Tuesday. Infected accounts sent tweets containing a link to a URL that masqueraded as a video site, but actually contained malicious JavaScript. Mac or Linux users who clicked on the link were redirected not to the malware site but to adult sites. Twitter said over the weekend that it will shutter accounts known to be distributing the worm. — DK

A Vietnamese security vendor says it has traced the recent DDoS attack on U.S. and South Korean websites to a server in the U.K., but another cybersecurity expert says the ultimate source of the attacks is still unknown.

Gmail has added an icon next to verified emails coming from PayPal and eBay to signify they are not spam or phishes, Brad Taylor, Gmail spam czar, said in a blog post Monday. The "authentication icon for verified senders," which must be turned on by Gmail users by visiting the "Labs" tab under "Settings," will cause a key icon to appear next to legitimate messages coming from PayPal and eBay. Google soon hopes to extend the same protection to other popular senders, Taylor said. — DK

Metasploit has released an exploit for Mozilla Firefox version 3.5 Tracemonkey components of Firefox’s javascript rendering engine. The bug is covered in in Mozilla’s Bugzilla as bug 503286. The first public exploit seen was in Milw0rm by the author SBerry aka Simon Berry-Byrne, he gives thanks to HD for his help in writing the exploit […]

One U.S. lawmaker is urging the U.S. to take action against North Korea for the recent distributed-denial-of-service attacks, but others say the U.S. cannot play the blame game this soon.