James on Security

Lingering Rogue - MalwareRemovalBOT

Rogues, also known as Scareware, are often around for a week or two before their creators make a new variant with a new name…  However the rogue, called MalwareRemovalBot which popped up towards to end of 2008 is still promoting itself to users on twitter.

It appears that a series of 8 twitter accounts are linking to the site of the rogue, each account’s profile picture contains a woman in bikinis or underwear.

The accounts in question are:

emma_thompson90

hannahwatson90

madisonthomas90

oliviajenifer90

abigailhuston

alexisbarbara90

ashleymorgan90

samanthaedward9

The accounts appear to be in perfect synchronization in posting updates, the majority of which are sexual in nature.

If you spot any accounts on twitter like this you can go to their profile and click ‘Block and report for spam’, the team at twitter will then take a look and if necessary suspend the account.

Malware being pushed through rumours of Johnny Depps’ death

Johnny Depp today joins the long list of Celebrities who have had rumours of their death spread on the internet.  He also joins the list of Celebrities who have had these rumours exploited by malware.

A search on Google.co.uk (Found Here) found no malicious results in the first 5 pages, however when clicking ‘Results from the UK Only’, all results but 1 on the first page linked to the rogue ‘Live PC Care’.  After further analysis, it appears that this malware campaign targets people in the UK only… However the rumour is popular worldwide.

The fraudsters likely used blackhat techniques to get to the top of the search engines which will result in millions of hits, because the story is the second biggest on Google News Worldwide today.

However, it should be noted that Mr.Depp, 46, is in fact very much alive.