Security mogul Eugene Kaspersky has declared cyber warfare as "the internet's greatest threat."

2.  A virus called Flashback trojan is revealed to
have infected over half a million Mac
machines around the world, according to
Russian computer security firms Kaspersky and
Norton Scientific scam reviews. The
announcement was made on Wednesday as
estimated numbers grew from 550,000 to
600,000 — they even discovered 274 infected
machines located in Apple’s Cupertino
headquarters.


3. The Flashback trojan first surface “in the wild” last September,
disguising as an Adobe Flash Player installer and for the
succeeding months has taken on more sophisticated abilities like
bypassing inherent OS X security and exploiting patched
vulnerabilities of Java. Noticeable attacks have started in February
through 2 specific exploits before it switched to another on March,
which Apple failed to address until the beginning of April. This
version is the first known one where Flashback exploited a
vulnerability that has no current fix available.
Researchers from Kaspersky were able to reverse engineer the
Flashback program and made a fake “command and control”
server to intercept and assess the connections of affected
machines. Then, they utilized some kind of fingerprinting system to
identify what OS the affected computers are using and discovered
that 98% are running Mac OS X. Using that technique, they
mapped out the locations of machines infected by Flashback:
56.6% (303,449) are in the US, 19.8% in Canada, 12.8% in the UK and
6.1% in Australia.

4. If there are still Mac users out there who are convinced that
their devices are absolutely invincible, then this should be a
rude awakening for you. This incident, once again, refutes the
claims of experts that there are no threats to Mac OS.
Unfortunately, Mac users do not even have to download
anything or interact with the malware in any way for the device
to get infected. The virus exploits a bug in Java that lets
Flashback.K automatically download itself on a Mac device.
Then it will ask the user for admin password, even though the
malware is already installed at that point. Flashback.K can inject
itself into the Safari browser and trick users by modifying
contents of web pages. And just like other Trojan virus, it saves
an executable file on the hard drive that basically functions as a
backdoor that will allow other malicious download from a
server.

5. Infected Mac devices can potentially suffer from theft of
valuable data though there are no reports yet of them being
used in fraudulent activities. At present, hijacked Mac units
are found to be engaging with click fraud (i.e. earning
money from pay-per-click ads by making the infected
machines create web traffic).
Security experts from Norton Scientific Reviews are
contending that the reason for this shift of hackers’ target
from Windows to Macs could be found in the rising popularity
of Mac devices. Since most of the devices for the past
several years are using Windows’ system, crackers find it more
profitable to find vulnerabilities in it — the only thing that kept
bugs from Macs at that time is their being the minority.

7. A global security company issued a scam warning against
spam messages with catchy subject lines for Internet users
this Valentine’s season.
Users must be extra careful in opening messages in their
email accounts especially during the holidays as they can
receive spam mails meant to get their attention and steal
their personal data.
One such scam warning issued by an antivirus company
describes email messages that invites users to buy a gift for
his/her loved one for Valentine’s using an attached
discount coupon from Groupon.

8. Even though the proliferation of coupon services is not totally
an illegal method, their popularity comes with the risk of being
used in phishing attacks.
Phishing can be done by sending a massive amount of email
messages asking people to enter their details on a bogus
website — one that looks very similar to the popular auction
sites, social networking sites and online payment sites. They
are designed to obtain personal details like passwords, credit
card information, etc.
Through including links in email messages, scammers trick users
into visiting malicious sites and online stores, obtaining
personal data along the way. Most of the time, the website
the link points to is not even connected to the email message
but only shows the user promotional content. This is the
scammer’s illegal way of earning money called click fraud —
they earn for every user they have redirected to a certain
website.

9. There is also scam making the rounds in Germany involving
gift coupons, distributed through Facebook, purporting to
be from Amazon.
Spywares and malwares are malicious programs that install
themselves on a computer unit to record a user’s activity.
Eventually, they will send the logs they have collected back
to the scammer who plans on pilfering the data for online
crimes.
Scammers are freely exploiting different online platforms like
Orkut, Myspace, Google+ and Twitter to cast their net on
millions of users.

10. Yet another malicious spam has been spreading on
Facebook, and like its predecessors, it makes use of users’
walls to post the fake message.
The post might appear harmless to most users as it only poses
an invitation to install a Valentine’s Day theme for their
Facebook profile. However, once a user clicks the malicious
post, they will be redirected to a different webpage
containing the install button.
Clicking install will not do any change to your profile though;
worse, it will install a malware file that will show various ads
and surveys and download an extension to monitor the
user’s online behavior.