Intel’s Atom processor unveiled

The trend toward ever smaller and cheaper PC components is, of course, nothing new. Chips have shrunk and prices have fallen for over 30 years now. Yet that trend has accelerated dramatically in recent years, spurred onward by the rise of mobile computing and signified by the success of low-cost laptops like the Asus Eee PC and high-zoot mobile computers like the iPhone. Sensing this trend, the world’s largest chipmaker kicked off an effort four years ago to develop a CPU that could fit inside the power, heat, and size requirements of such devices while maintaining compatibility with its existing lineup of PC processors. Internally at Intel, this processor became known as Silverthorne, and the core logic associated with it was code-named Poulsbo. Together, they make up the so-called Menlow platform, whose development we’ve been tracking for some time now.

Today, Silverthorne and Menlow are taking their final shape with the introduction of the Intel Atom processor and the Centrino Atom mobile computing brand. Thanks to an all-new CPU microarchitecture and companion core-logic chip, Intel is pushing x86-compatible computing into new frontiers. To better understand how they did it, we recently visited the Austin, Texas offices of the Silverthorne design team and spoke with several of the chips’ architects. Read on for an extensive overview of this new CPU and its related technology.

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F-Secure predicts million viruses by end of 2008

The amount of new malware has never been higher. Our labs are receiving an average of 25,000 malware samples every day, seven days a week. If this trend continues, the total number of viruses and Trojans will pass the one million mark by the end of 2008.

While there are more viruses being created than ever before, people often actually report seeing less of them. One reason behind this illusion is that malware authors are once again changing their tactics in how to infect our computers. A year or two ago, most malware was spread via e-mail attachments, which resulted in mass outbreaks like Bagle, Mydoom and Warezov.

Nowadays sending .EXE attachments in e-mail doesn’t work so well for the criminals because almost every company and organization is filtering out such risky attachments from their e-mail traffic. The criminals’ new preferred way of spreading malware is by drive-by downloads on the Web. These attacks often still start with an e-mail spam run but the attachment in the e-mail has been replaced by a web link, which takes you to the malicious web site. So instead of getting infected over SMTP, you get infected over HTTP.

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Unusual banking trojan found today

We’ve seen tons of banking trojans lately, but now we’ve run into something quite unique.

This new banking trojan was found today from a drive-by-download site. We’ve added detection for it as Win32.Pril.A

It not only infects the MBR of the machine, but also reflashes the boot code in the Flash BIOS, making disinfection problematic.

Once an infected machine is online, the trojan monitors the users actions, waiting him to go to go to one of several hundred online banks, located all over the world.

Once the user has logged on, the banking trojan uses PCMCIA to inject code into the VGA! As an end result, the trojan creates a man-in-the-browser attack against the victim.

Now, the really surprising part is what the trojan does. Normal banking trojans would insert extra transactions or change the deposit account numbers on-the-fly. However, Win32.Pril.A doesn’t withdraw money from you – it actually inserts money TO your account. This looked so weird we had to test it several times, on all of our accounts.

The drive-by-download site is still up. Normally, we wouldn’t list the URL for such a site, or we would at least obfuscate it in a screenshot. However this time we’ll make an exception. We will even make the link clickable: http://aprilbanking.cjb.net/

Source: F-Secure

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Slide.com Hosting Malware

Websense Security Labs has been tracking the use of Slide.com as a hosting site for malware for several months. The popular Web 2.0 social networking Web site, ranked 252 by Alexa (Alexa Ranking), is both the largest Facebook application developer and a free and easy place to host malware.

Having tracked the various ways malware is hosted on the site, it appears most popular with attackers targeting Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking audiences. We have seen targeted attacks with fake YouTube email lures in Portuguese that link to malware hosted on Slide.com.

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Researchers dive into memory dumps

Building on earlier research into cold-boot attacks on computer memory, two consultants showed off their prototype tools for grabbing passwords from untended computers, during a session at the CanSecWest conference last week.

The consultants — Sherri Davidoff and Tom Liston, both of security firm Intelguardians — found that numerous Windows and Linux applications keep passwords unencypted in a computer’s physical memory during run time. The two researchers experimented with a number of methods of creating a bootable image on a USB thumb drive that could scan for and grab passwords from the random access memory (RAM) of computers to which an attacker had access.

“The goal here is to see if we can hit an office building in 25 minutes or less and get out with a lot of valuable data,” Davidoff told attendees.

Davidoff and Liston had investigated the issues around the same time that a mixed group of academic and privacy researchers had discovered that sensitive data kept in the random-access memory (RAM) of a computer could last for at least 10 minutes after the machine is shut down, if the memory is cooled using compressed air. The so-called “cold boot” attack allows an attacker the ability to restart a computer and use a bootable drive to grab data from memory.

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