creators

The creators of the Flame virus now appear to be attempting to remove it from the computers it has infected. This bizarre move from hackers, who normally seek to increase rather than decrease the number of machines their code infects, may be part of ... a belated attempt to prevent further analysis of how Flame works. The existence of Flame was announced late last month by security firm Kaspersky Lab. At the time, Kaspersky noted the virus was exceptionally sophisticated and had been designed specifically to harvest data using tactics as diverse as taking screenshots and eavesdropping on phone ... (view more)

Though it's been out of the headlines for some time, the Conficker virus is alive and well. Researchers say it appears the virus has kept working despite little if any attention from its creators. According to Mikko Hypponen of F-Secure, one of the ... firms investigating the virus, there are still more than 5.5 million computers infected by Conficker, with Brazil, Vietnam and China particularly affected. That may be because computer owners there are less likely to be able to afford security software and more likely to be running pirated copies of Windows which are less likely to update Microsoft ... (view more)