Kaspersky unveiled a new tool on Thursday called "Krab Krawler" that analyzes the millions of tweets posted on Twitter every day and blocks any malware associated with them.
The tool looks at every public post as it appears on Twitter, extracts any URLs in them and analyzes the Web page they lead to, expanding any URLS that have been shortened, Costin Raiu, a senior malware analyst at Kaspersky, said in an interview.
The company is scanning nearly 500,000 new unique URLs that appear in Twitter posts daily, he said. Of those, anywhere between 100 and 1,000 are malware attacks. Twitter has also been targeted by the Koobface virus which posts malicious links from infected users' accounts.
About 26 percent of the total posts contain URLs, and many of those lead to spam sites that are marketing products or services and aren't considered malware, according to Raiu. Tens of thousands of different accounts are posting spam links, most likely from accounts created by bots, he said. The most frequent URLs posted lead to online dating sites, he added.
Twitter has its own filtering system, but some malicious links still manage to get through, Raiu said.
While Kaspersky's regular antivirus software may detect and block 95 percent of the malware Twitter users are threatened with, malware code changes frequently to evade filters and it could take between two and 12 hours for new stuff to be classified as malicious and detected, he said.
While antivirus companies have traditionally focused on protecting e-mail-borne viruses, they are increasingly turning their attention to social-media sites as attackers do.
Trend Micro has technology that monitors Twitter posts for malicious URLs, as well as looks for attack patterns in the posts, such as use of popular terms to indirectly lead people to malicious links, said Morton Swimmer, a senior threat researcher at Trend Micro.
Meanwhile, Finjan offers a free browser plug-in dubbed SecureTweets that warns users when they encounter a malicious URL in Twitter, as well as Gmail, Blogger, MSN, MySpace, Google search, Yahoo, and other sites.
Social-media sites are popular for attackers not only because people are flocking to them, but also because users seem to trust messages that appear to come from friends on those sites more than they trust e-mails, Raiu said.
"People are worried about unsolicited e-mail, so they are careful not to run the programs they get by e-mail, but they aren't prepared to deal with these kinds of new attacks," he said.
The most common piece of malware associated with Twitter links is Trojan-Clicker.HTMLIFrame, a malicious JavaScript that can get downloaded to a computer when it visits a compromised Web site.
(Credit: Kaspersky)
Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 and Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010 went live this week, and we've created a slideshow to help users see what's new and what needs work in one of the leading security programs.
UPDATED: Benchmarks provided by CNET Labs were added on Monday, August 24.
A new season of security suites is upon us, and Kaspersky has made improvements to its Kaspersky Internet Security and Kaspersky Anti-Virus programs that include changes indicative of where security software as an industry is leaning. Three new features along with expected upgrades to its antivirus engine keep Kaspersky competitive.
The main window of Kaspersky Internet Security 2010.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)The full-feature suite Kaspersky Internet Security offers a complete and competitive range of security options. The new features in the 2010 edition include a behavioral-based detection system called the Urgent Detection System. The UDS utilizes the anonymous data of 10 million Kaspersky customers who choose to participate in submitting their system scans to Kaspersky's central servers for analysis. In fact, the UDS must be opted-out of--there's a check box and data collection statement to read when you install the program.
Although this might sound insidious, it's actually a smart way to leverage a huge consumer base for security purposes as long as the data remains anonymous. Symantec's Norton 2010 will contain a behavioral check, too, and what both do is look at programs installed on your computer and judge their safety based on how many people have them installed and how they behave. Among UDS's better sub-features are the ability to customize how long it takes to pass judgment on a new program and per-user configuration of the rules governing program behavior.
Even if a program has deep penetration and it starts behaving badly, Kaspersky will block it. If it's an unknown, Kaspersky will treat it skeptically, monitoring and restricting the program until it has been proven safe. The Vulnerability Scan option, available under the Scan tab, utilizes tech from Secunia to determine which programs are potential security risks because they lack recent updates or patches. For programs that may not warn you that they have a pending security update, such as Adobe Flash, having this tool baked-in could be exceptionally useful.
... Read moreFor the last few months, I've been hearing some well-regarded security people tell me they are considering ditching their antivirus protection all together. They haven't done it, but these individuals feel the days of having a special application scan to remove malware on your desktop are numbered. Malware has changed, but the applications to ferret them out have not.
Antivirus programs, as we know them today, are based on 20-year-old technology of pattern matching. Pattern matching may have worked in the days of the Micheangelo virus and even as recently as Netsky, but methodically matching each and every file on a computer against a list of known malware is getting tedious, if not archaic. In 2007, Symantec detected more than 1 million viruses, with two-thirds created within the calendar year. Loading 1 million signatures, or even a percentage of that if generic signatures are used, is a pretty serious undertaking.
That's why vendors are talking to me about newer strategies for 2009 (and beyond). Among these is the exact opposite of signature file databases--something called whitelisting. If pattern matching is just another way of saying certain bad files have been blacklisted, whitelisting goes to the other extreme: it only allows certain trusted files to run on your machine.
That's more or less what Symantec CEO John Thompson called for at this year's RSA: "If the growth of malicious software continues to outpace the growth of legitimate software, techniques like whitelisting--where we identify and allow only the good stuff to come in--will become critical." He actually didn't say much more about whitelisting, yet everyone talks about this speech as though Thompson had provided clear guidance the year of whitelisting.
So how viable is whitelisting? Turns out we've been using it to defend against spam for years.
To see how whitelisting works on an enterprise level, I spoke with Tom Murphy, chief strategy officer for Bit9, a Massachusetts-based company that has been quietly leading the way in whitelist technology.
For several years Bit9 has been building what it calls a Global Software Registry or GSR (formerly called Bit9 Knowledgebase), cataloging "known good" and "known bad" applications and files. Murphy said Bit9 uses three methods--MD5, SHA1 and OMAC--to create a unique hash of the file and ensure that the file is what it says it is. For the moment, the catalog is used for Bit9's enterprise products. But they've entered into an agreement with Kaspersky, who will be using the registry for its 2009 desktop security products.
Bit9 is not alone. SecureWave's Sanctuary, Savant Protection, and DriveSentry have also been creating whitelisting technology for the enterprise. What's interesting is that the big guys Google (Green Border Technologies), Microsoft (Winternals Software's Protection Manager, and now Symantec have started paying attention to whitelisting.
Which gets us back to antivirus software.
If hosting a million antivirus signature files is daunting, how many "clean" files might there be? Think about all the versions of software that exist, not to mention the files those products create.
The downside of whitelisting, indeed the main argument, is that all those clean files outnumber the bad guys by a considerable margin. Right now, maintaining a whitelist file is impractical for the desktop.
Trend Micro (if it wants to get into the whitelist space) thinks it has the answer. For the last few years, Trend Micro has been building servers around the world to provide continuous service to its Software-as-a-service enterprise systems. Last month, Trend Micro CEO Eva Chen told me it's time to bring that SaaS service down to the desktop. Instead of having all the signature files on the desktop, the desktop app would instead ping "the cloud" and get results from the much larger database of known malware stored there.
Make no mistake, Trend Micro is still using antivirus signature databases. Chen said even after 20 years, there are still advantages to pattern-matching antivirus signature files. For one thing, she says it's faster than firing up a heuristic sandbox and testing each individual piece of malware. True, although we're talking about shaving nanoseconds between the two processes. Still, with several thousand files, those saved nanoseconds do add up. So instead of running the operation on the PC, the PC sends all its unknowns to a server in the cloud and gets the results back lickety-split. An added benefit, says Chen, is that new samples are submitted in real time and evaluated quickly. In her estimate, Trend Micro can have a new signature file for an unknown threat ready within 15 minutes.
Fifteen minutes is also the new mantra over at Symantec. For its 2009 Norton products, Tom Powledge, vice president of consumer product management at Symantec, told me the new products are lighter and faster in part because they've jettisoned the multiple copies of the signature database found in previous versions. They're also not scanning each and every file. Instead, the 2009 products will be building a trust index--that is, the app will declaring certain files (say photos or MP3s) clean and then not scan them again unless the files change. He showed me a graphic where roughly 70 percent of a given machine is trusted, and only that last 30 percent is actively scanned.
Like Trend, Norton is experimenting with faster new malware turnaround. Powledge says Norton should be updating not every 15 minutes, but every couple of minutes. This is a vast improvement from hourly or even daily updates by some antivirus vendors.
Given the improvements to the traditional antivirus programs proposed by Trend Micro and Symantec, are the days of antivirus applications numbered?
Yes.
I asked Murphy if white lists worked well enough to replace traditional antivirus protection at some companies. He answered, very diplomatically, "if (a customer) feel(s) that they have a control over the environment, some customers have removed antivirus off their machines."
I'm still not convinced that white listing is the way to go, but I do know that security solutions in the enterprise space have a way of trickling down to the desktop.
Editor's note: This article was updated on February 21, 2008. The original was published on February 28, 2007.
Like its mythical namesake (dramatized in Lego), whatever crawls out of a digital Trojan horse will be a nasty surprise. A Trojan horse usually takes the form of an innocuous software program that unleashes a flood of malware or viruses after it's installed and run. Since attacks and ease of removal vary--an ad generator is easier to remove than a stealth rootkit--there's no one-size-fits-all solution. However, there are some common spyware removal techniques that can help you pick your way through the wreckage.
Reboot Windows in Safe Mode
What is Safe Mode?
Safe Mode is a diet version of the Standard Mode of Windows that your computer ordinarily runs. Rebooting in Safe Mode loads minimal programs and disables most device drivers that manage hardware like CD drives and printers. The result is a more stable iteration of the Windows operating system that's better suited for disabling malware while you perform a system scan.
How do you use it?
If you can, follow the necessary steps for a safe shutdown process and then reboot. When you restart Windows, as the screen begins to load, press F8 repeatedly until the Windows booting options appear. Select "Boot in Safe Mode" from the menu of options. Once in Safe Mode, you should be able to run your installed antispyware software with less interference from the malicious software that the Trojan brought onto your system.
System Restore
What is System Restore?
System Restore strings out a safety net if everything goes kaput. Under default Window settings, System Restore saves a snapshot of your computer configuration once a day and on major upgrades that can be used to replace corrupted files. In the event of a Trojan attack, System Restore can revert Windows to a previous, uninfected state. It won't restore everything, like changes to your user profile, but it does reinstate biggies like your Registry and DLL cache.
When do you use it?
When purging your computer of spyware, System Restore has an optimal time and place. You wouldn't want your computer including corrupted files as the reference point of the day, so it's important to disable System Restore before you start cleaning. You can reactivate it once your system is spick-and-span.
How do you use it?
The paths for accessing System Restore differ by operating system. In Windows XP, disable System Restore by right-clicking My Computer and selecting Properties. Under the Performance tab, select File System, then the Troubleshooting tab, and finally check Disable System Restore. You'll be prompted to reboot. Follow these steps to uncheck the box before restoring your system.
To use System Restore after scrubbing your computer, choose Accessories from the program list in the Start menu. You'll find System Restore under System Tools.
This comprehensive article from TechRepublic demonstrates how to create and use System Restore in Windows Vista.
Scan with antivirus/antispyware apps
Downloading diagnostic and removal tools with an infected computer is a huge time sink--spyware can cripple your speed and Internet access. The Trojan's payload could prevent EXE files from downloading or launching. Also, malware can affect the performance of installed security software on your PC. If you store your antivirus/antispyware programs on a CD or flash drive, however, those malware-busting apps can commence their swashbuckling unhindered.... Read more
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