New Haxdoor backdoor variant

Numerous recent reports of a new variant of the Haxdoor backdoor variant being spammed as an e-mail attachment shows its growing popularity, says F-Secure.

Hackdoor is a powerful backdoor with rootkit and spying capabilities that can hide its presence, processes and file on an infected system.

This means that once activated, the backdoor can only be detected by anti-virus programs that use kernel drivers and by rootkit detectors.

Paedophile Adrian Ringland forced a Canadian schoolgirl to send him explicit photographs of herself, after installing a Trojan backdoor on her PC, reports The ITShield.

Ringland allegedly posed as teenager and sent her "photos" of himself which were infected with a Trojan backdoor.

After the accused gained control of the schoolgirl`s computer, he blackmailed the victim, forcing her into submission and abuse.

A survey conducted by SoftScan found virus levels have doubled in August and now account for 1.02% of all e-mails sent, according to Vnunet.

The survey also showed that 89% of all viruses stopped were classified as phishing attempts. However, SoftScan believes this rise in phishing attacks is due to the upgrading of anti-virus detection software rather than an increase in attacks.

Spam remains high at 87.7%, but will reduce as soon as the summer holidays in the US come to close.

A new made-in-Vietnam virus has begun to spread rapidly though Yahoo Messenger (YM), says Vietnamnet.

The virus has been luring potential victims via displaying two malicious .exe links containing the words 'freeweb`. Once clicked, a file named Funni will then gain control over the compromised PC and send the same infected links to the victim`s entire list of Yahoo buddies.

In less than a day, it was discovered that this kind of virus stole over 1 200 passwords from computers in Vietnam.

In the last two years, US consumers lost more than $8 billion to viruses, spyware and phishing schemes, says WebKnowHow.

This is according to results from a consumer State of the Net survey, among a nationally representative sample of more than 2 000 households with Internet access.

The results also indicate consumers stand a one in three chance of becoming a cyber victim, and that virus infections prompted an estimated 2.6 million households to replace their computers in the past two years.