Bank customers of at least two Australian banks have become victims of a phishing scam in which malicious payload discloses the physical location of attacked IP addresses using Google Maps. Bank of America and Germany's Deutsche Bank were also attacked.
Wow ..Would you think of that ? Read on.

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that New York has achieved ground-breaking settlements with three major online advertisers for endorsing products and services on the Internet through deceptively installed programs known as “adware.”
The implications of these settlements go beyond the amount of penalties….

PandaLabs has released its list of the spyware most frequently detected by Panda ActiveScan in 2006. The top ranking spyware is Gator. This adware offers free use of an program if users agree to view a series of pop-up messages downloaded by Gator. Some versions of this spyware replace banners on web pages visited with those created by the malicious code itself.

One of the most useful thing you can do today is to search Google on "Internet Defender" and click on its Microsoft site.
Here you download the final version of a Microsoft program that blocks spyware and other unwanted applications from your system. It made the jump from beta test to finished release on New Year's Day.

Mobile viruses are becoming more frequent; so are many other security threats to mobile devices and the data they hold. Lately, however, researchers have learned that hackers are now creating mobile spyware, which control SMS messages and allows them to be read by others.

Washington's attorney general has settled the first case prosecuted under the state's 2005 Computer Spyware Act.

The settlement, declared Monday, is with antispyware vendor Secure Computer LLC. The White Plains, New York, software company was charged of marketing its product via deceptive spam and pop-up ads, which offered free spyware scans that always detected a problem with the computer that was scanned.

A new variant of a malicious bot program is spreading exploiting a flaw in Symantec's antivirus software as well as through several holes in Microsoft code.

The worm, called 'Spybot.ACYR' by Symantec and 'Sdbot.worm!811a7027' by McAfee, seems to be targeting educational institutions, according to a blog item posted by Symantec. The security company said: "We are seeing a spike in traffic on port 2967 with activity only in the dot-edu domain. The impact of the attack is minimal thus far."

Security software developer PC Tools declared that up to 50 percent of new spyware threats originated from China and Russia aims specific information for identity theft.

The advice comes among a flood of terrible predictions, as fraudsters and malware writers gear up for a busy Christmas.

A new adware program like a ghost installs itself on Mac OS X systems and opens Web browser windows, said F-Secure.

The software, dubbed iAdware by the Finnish security company, is perhaps the first example of adware for Macs. It is particularly interesting since it doesn't require administrative privileges to lie on the computers, according to F-Secure.

In two recent studies of anti-phishing tools, one (sponsored by Microsoft) rated Internet Explorer highest, whilst the second (carried out for Mozilla) put the latest version of FireFox at the top of the list. Now a third, completely independent study has said that all phishing filters miss considerable numbers of suspect sites, are short on usability and suffer false positives.