CyberDefender Corporation, the developer with the Internet’s most advanced early detection and Internet security tools, has identified the Scvhost.exe~u virus as a category 9.9 in their Virus Alert-Internet Security Center. 9.9 rating is considered to be an extremely high risk computer virus.

Typically this extremely high level rating indicates the virus can log user activity and present a high risk of potential system damage or distribution. These types of threats are difficult to contain and often use unauthorized, invisible installation. In addition to logging keyboard activity and taking system snapshots, these high risk viruses may profile users, send confidential user data to remote servers, and have the ability to disable some anti-virus or firewall programs.

Svchost.exe is a valid generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries. At startup, Svchost.exe checks the services part of the registry to construct a list of services that it must load. Multiple instances of Svchost.exe can run at the same time.

On the other hand, Scvhost.exe is virus or in some Antivirus programs categorized as Adware or Spyware.

The good guy is svchost.exe the scvhost.exe is a bad guy as stated at this link http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintaskspro/processlibrary/scvhost/

Run one of these free online scans:

Cyberdefender

Panda

These take a little while to run but will be worth it. Be sure to set them to auto clean if asked and any files that cannot be cleaned or deleted write them down (full path for example C:\WINDOWS\System32\svhost.exe)

Malicious messages and phishing

source Darya Gudkova: http://www.viruslist.com/en/analysis?pubid=204792038

Malicious files were attached to 1.09% of all email messages, 0.39% more than August’s figure.

Links to phishing sites were present in 0.62% of messages. Several limited attacks by the RockPhish group were detected in September. In most cases about 100-300 fake URLs were used.

The majority of phishing attacks targeted PayPal (36%) and eBay (18%).

Organizations targeted by phishing attacks

Russian phishers continued to attack users of the popular Russian email services Mail.ru and Rambler and the Yandex.Money e-payement system.

Spam by category

Breakdown of spam categories on the Russian internet in September 2008

In September, the top five categories were Adult content spam (28%), Medications, health-related goods and services (19%), Education (12%), Fake designer goods (6%), Travel and tourism (6%)

The Adult content spam category took first place from the Medications, health-related goods and services category, the first time there has been a change at the top since April 2007. The upturn in fortunes of the adult content category and its impressive 9% lead was mostly due to Russian-language spammers advertising pornographic websites. The mailing of pornographic spam has recently become so aggressive that it may account for more than half of all emails sent to the addresses listed in spammers’ databases.

Spam is still being used for negative PR. Earlier, the use of spam as a negative PR tool was limited mainly to election campaigns. Now, however, those initiating such mailings are distributing information designed to discredit certain companies or businessmen, by warning the user of their supposed unreliability. These types of messages started to appear in the middle of the summer and show no sign of letting up. It reminds us once again that by trusting the information contained in unsolicited messages from unknown senders, the recipient is allowing complete strangers to influence his own opinion.

Spammer methods and tricks

Spammers didn’t make any real new technical innovations in September. HTML tags and “invisible” text (white letters on a white background) were used to “hide” adverts from context filters, while the site addresses in messages advertising adult content were “drawn” using various symbols with a certain amount of spaces and paragraphs between them.

Even if spam messages reach users’ mail boxes, in most cases the messages are deleted by the recipients. Spammers, therefore, use social engineering to ensure that recipients notice their emails and believe the message content.

Social engineering is used extensively by spammers when spreading malicious programs. One mass mailing offered users the chance to download a new antivirus solution; the message was allegedly sent to 100 “lucky” addresses which had been chosen at random. The message also recommended that any antivirus protection installed on the user’s machine should be disabled before downloading the new program. When a user tried to download Antivirus Raptor, Trojan-PSW.Win32.LdPinch was downloaded instead.

In another email, supposedly sent by a former student missing his classmates, the recipient was asked to look through the list of graduates attached to the message. Instead of a list of ex-students, however, the attachment contained a malicious program: Trojan-Dropper.MSWord.1Table.gm.

Emails imitating legitimate messages from popular Internet resources became a common feature of spam mailings in September. Russian spammers spreading malicious programs already have experience of sending out emails that appear to be messages from social networks. In September, spammers started sending out emails that imitated messages from non-Russian resources of this type. Recipients were asked to visit the site of a school friend which actually turned out to be the spammer’s webpage.