Pesticide May Give Honeybee Virus an Advantage

Posted on January 28, 2012 by admin

A common pesticide used by beekeepers to kill honeybee-infecting mites temporarily leaves the bees more susceptible to a debilitating virus, new research suggests.

From parasitic flies to numerous viruses, honeybee colonies across the globe have a lot of things threatening their survival, but perhaps no stressor is as disastrous as varroa destructor mites. The tiny vampiric arachnids latch onto bees of all stages of life and suck their “blood.” Often in the process, the mites deliver to the bees deformed wing virus — which causes wing disfigurements in developing pupae, resulting in flightless bees that die shortly after their emergence. Both these mites and the deformed wing virus have been implicated in colony collapse disorder, and together they can wipe out an entire honeybee colony within a few years if left untreated, scientists have found.

The most successful weapon against these mites (at least those that haven’t developed a resistance) has been pesticides called acaricides. However, scientists know little about the chemicals’ effects on honeybee viruses. To find out, Joachim de Miranda, a bee ecologist at the Swedish University of Agriculture Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden, and his colleagues studied the effects of the common acaricide Apistanon levels of several viruses in honeybees.

To their surprise, they found that concentrations of deformed wing virus in treated bee colonies initially increased for a period, before ultimately dropping when more mites died (though the virus levels didn’t fall below those seen in untreated colonies until the last week of the 6-week treatment used in the study).

If future studies conclusively show that Apistan causes a spike in the virulence of deformed wing virus, the findings could have implications for beekeepers, the researchers say.

“Make sure that you know that you absolutely have to treat before treating with acaricides,” de Miranda told LiveScience. “If you don’t have a lot of mites, then this treatment will only cause you more damage.”

Of mites and viruses

During the winter, honeybees do not hibernate, but instead cling tightly together on the combs in the hive to form insulating “clusters.” While in the cluster, the bees still

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Article Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pesticide-may-honeybee-virus-advantage-170411063.html

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SuperAntiSpyware Professional 5.0.1144

Posted on January 28, 2012 by admin

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Article Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/htmlit_download/~3/hR3bmPBBTLg/

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Massive Android Malware Op May Have Infected 5 Million Users

Posted on January 28, 2012 by admin

The largest-ever Android malware campaign may have duped as many as 5 million users into downloading infected apps from Google’s Android Market, Symantec said today.

Dubbed “Android.Counterclank” by Symantec, the malware was packaged in 13 different apps from three different publishers, with titles ranging from “Sexy Girls Puzzle” to “Counter Strike Ground Force.” Many of the infected apps were still available on the Android Market as of 3 p.m. ET Friday.

“They don’t appear to be real publishers,” Kevin Haley, a director with Symantec’s security response team, said in an interview today. “These aren’t rebundled apps, as we’ve seen so many times before.”

Haley was referring to a common tactic by Android malware makers to repackage a legitimate app with attack code, then re-release it to the marketplace in the hope that users will confuse the fake with the real deal.

Symantec estimated the impact by combining the download totals — which the Android Market shows as ranges — of the 13 apps, arriving at a figure between 1 million on the low end and 5 million on the high. “Yes, this is the largest malware [outbreak] on the Android Market,” said Haley.

Android.Counterclank is a Trojan horse that when installed on an Android smartphone collects a wide range of information, including copies of the bookmarks and the handset maker. It also modifies the browser’s home page.

The hackers have monetized the malware by pushing unwanted advertisements to compromised Android phones.

Although the infected apps request an uncommonly large number of privileges — something that the user must approve — Haley argued that few people bother reading them before giving their okay.

“If you were the suspicious type, you might wonder why they’re asking for permission to modify the browser or transmit GPS coordinates,” said Haley. “But most people don’t bother.”

Android.Counterclank is a minor variation on an older Android Trojan horse called Android.Tonclank that was discovered in June 2011.

Some of the 13 apps that Symantec identified as infected have been on the Android Market for at least a month, according to the revision dates posted on the

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Article Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/248880/massive_android_malware_op_may_have_infected_5_million_users.html

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Email scams at tax time

Posted on January 28, 2012 by admin

The cyberscum who seek to pilfer your personal information have many ways to lure victims into their traps, and a favorite is the phishing scam – bogus emails that link to a rogue site into which the hapless type private data.

The creators of these emails try their best to make them look authentic, and they’ll often theme them around news events. For example, shortly after last year’s devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, scammers began flooding inboxes with fake charity emails. Anyone who typed credit card information into the site linked from those phishing attempts donated only to the criminals’ coffers.

Fortunately, most phishing scams are badly done, and anything more than a cursory glance will make it obvious that they’re, well, phishy.

Now it’s U.S. tax time, and you’re starting to see email scams invoking the Internal Revenue Service. One of these recently landed in some inboxes here at the Mighty Houston Chronicle, and I thought it might be useful to deconstruct it to highlight the telltale signs of a phishing attempt.

The email appears to come from Intuit, makers of Quicken and TurboTax software. It tries to get the recipient to go to a website to correct conflicting details in an account. It’s clearly a fake, and here’s why.

1. The email purports to be from Intuit, but the “From:” field has a Bank of America address. This may be an attempt to get through spam filters, since many people make sure their online banking notifications are whitelisted. In almost all cases, the “From:” address on a phishing email will be forged or spoofed.

2. This email solicits sensitive financial information from the recipient, but it’s been sent to multiple people at the same company. I’ve blurred the “To:” list to protect those who received this, but this one email went to 10 people at the Chronicle. Although Intuit likely would never send an email like this one, if the company did, it would be directed to a single individual.

3. Note the appeal to urgency and a 30-day time limit which, by the way, isn’t mentioned in the body of the message.

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Article Source: http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2012/01/anatomy-of-a-phishing-attempt/

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Hackers picking on Windows Media Player exploit

Posted on January 27, 2012 by admin







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Security researchers from antivirus vendor Trend Micro have come across a Web-based attack that exploits a known vulnerability in Windows Media Player.

“Earlier today, we encountered a malware that exploits a recently (and publicly) disclosed vulnerability, the MIDI Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2012-0003),” Trend Micro threat response engineer Roland Dela Paz said in a blog post on Thursday.

The security flaw can be exploited by tricking the victim into opening a specially crafted MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) file in Windows Media Player.

Microsoft released a security fix for it on Jan. 10, as part of its monthly patch cycle. “An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system,” the company said at the time.

The so-called drive-by-download attack identified by Trend Micro researchers uses a malicious HTML page to load the malformed MIDI file as an embedded object for the Windows Media Player browser plug-in.

If successful, the exploit downloads and executes a computer Trojan on the targeted system, which Trend Micro detects as TROJ_DLOAD.QYUA. “We’re still conducting further analysis on TROJ_DLOAD.QYUA, but so far we’ve been seeing some serious payload, including rootkit capabilities,” Dela Paz said.

It’s not yet clear how victims are being tricked into visiting the malicious page, but the attack doesn’t appear to target a particular organization or group of people, said David Sancho, a senior antivirus researcher at Trend Micro.

According to the researcher, the attack is not widespread at the moment, but it is possible that other attackers will start exploiting the same vulnerability in the near future. “As mentioned, this is a publicly disclosed vulnerability

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Article Source: http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=65846

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