A Russian network of spam and malware affiliates known as “Partnerka” are beginning to aggressively focus on Apple Mac platform offering $.43 for each Mac machine infected.  Dmitry Samosseikko from Sophos Labs provided a stunning presentation at VB Conference 2009. 

As I discussed in the previous post about the Army taking up the Apple Mac platform that the common thought that Macs are immune to malware and have very few security issues was mostly bunk.  In fact, on a monthly basis the Apple Mac platform has more vulnerablities than Microsoft Windows OS.

As with most affiliate programs, the site was offering promotional material in the form of MacOS video  players and other trojanware.  DNS Changer trojans embedded in promises of porn videos was a popular stunt to infect Mac machines.

Author: Christopher

Another recent large scale breach has been identified as University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill notified around 163,000 women that there is a potential compromise that may result in the leak of personal information as well as their social security numbers.  This potential leak is due to a hacker breaching a system containing this data.

Although the breached server at UNC School of Medicine contained information on 236,000 women, only 163,000 contained social security information.   Matt Mauro, chairman of the university’s Department of Radiology said the breach was originally discovered in July but the intrusion may have taken place as long as two years ago.  Mauro said “We think we found some viruses that date back to 2007″.

The server was taken offline since July when the breach was detected and the sites sending information to UNC have temporarily stopped.  Forensic teams required time to piece together the extent of the damage and potential leaked information and is the main reason given for the delayed annoucement.  They do not believe the information was downloaded or modified in anyway at this point.

Tags: breach, hacker, hacks, Malware, social security, ssn, virus, viruses

Author: Christopher