Are you having troubles getting Steam to boot up today? If so, the problem might not be with Valve's blockbuster gaming service; the issue could be your antivirus, instead. This weekend, the freebie Avast! antivirus misidentified a Steam component as a nasty little Trojan and sent the executable to the time-out box known as Quarantine as a result. The problem: SteamService.exe was a totally clean file, and Steam won't run without it.
We've always known that Macs are susceptible to malware, but without a significant portion of market share, why should anyone bother? Now that numbers are up, Mac users are finding out that their platform of choice is also vulnerable, and it's not just Windows users who have to be on the lookout. The latest threat eating away at Apple PCs is a trojan horse that tries to dupe users into thinking it's a harmless Flash Player installer.
The Maximum PC Podcast keeps BS to a minimum while simultaneously supplying maxed-out levels of hijinks and information, but for you media-addicted types out there, one podcast a week might not fulfill your quota for listening pleasure. We understand if you turn to the excellent lineup of broadcasts put together by Leo Laporte and the awesome TWiT.tv team to catch up on your tech news, too, but you might want to pass on your regular visit to the TWiT.tv site this week; hackers have managed to slip some malicious code onto the site.
If you’re a follower of NBC News’ Twitter account, there’s a good chance you crapped your pants last Friday evening. “Breaking News! Ground Zero has just been attacked!” the feed blared, followed by flight numbers and rumors of hijacking attempts. Ten minutes later, a group calling themselves “The Script Kiddies” came clean and announced that they’d hacked the account. NBC’s been trying to figure out how the account became compromised ever since, and now they think they’ve found the culprit: a Trojan Christmas tree.
Linux end users may not have to worry about malware too often, but apparently, folks who like to roll their own code still draw the attention of hackers. Kernel.org, the online repository of the Linux kernel, is reporting that it fell victim to a security breach in August. Don’t start screaming and unplugging your Ubuntu PCs just quite yet, though – the administrators believe the attack only compromised users who accessed the kernel.org site, and not the Linux source code itself.
It's common practice to point the finger at China every time there's a major cyber attack, just as many security analysts did following 
Who can resist the idea of some free, mouth-wateringly good Chicken Selects Premium Breast Strips swallowed down with a delicious Strawberry Triple Thick Shake early on a Sunday morning? Nobody who isn't named RoboCop, that's who – and that's how the spammers get you. Now that we've become immune to naked celebs and cheap pharmaceuticals, the bad guys are going for our guts.
The entire source code for the Zeus trojan is now floating around the web within easy reach of any would-be miscreant who aspires to modify the code for their own evil deeds. Security firm CSIS discovered the source code being sold on at least two black market forums back in late March, and now says the crime kit is being leaked to the public on several underground forums and through other channels.
Over the course of the next four weeks, the U.S. Department of Justice will put into effect an initiative to remotely uninstall the Coreflood botnet Trojan from infected Windows PCs. The way it will go down is the DOJ will identify owners of infected rigs and then submit an authorization form to the FBI. It's the latest step in an effort to stomp out the botnet that's managed to seize control of some 2 million PCs.
If you give Malware authors an opening, they'll take it. In the wake of the recent Android Market malware scares, Google released a special security app that searches for and removes the so-called DroidDream malware. Google is pushing this app to affected phones automatically to take care of the problem. So what did the unscrupulous hacker characters do? They repackaged that security app with a trojan, of course.Connect with MaximumPC
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