September 15, 2011 - There is a widely held myth that using private clouds alleviates all the security concerns that come with the public cloud. While private clouds are a great way to get your feet wet in the cloud and do greatly help (continue reading...) Read more
June 20, 2011 - Troy Hunt, a Microsoft MVP, has done some terrific analysis of the passwords people use. Unfortunately, what has made this possible is the recent trend in hacktivism whereby it is common for hackivists to post the spoils of their attacks (continue reading...) Read more
May 20, 2011 - At first, I was just plain annoyed. Someone forwarded a hoax email to me twice in the same week. I am often asked about hoax email: “Kevin, you work at Symantec, is this true?” That’s fine; that’s not what annoyed (continue reading...) Read more
April 28, 2011 - As we have seen with many major events in the past, news of the British Royal Wedding is currently being used by cyber criminals to bolster their spam campaigns and push rogue antivirus software through black hat search engine optimization (continue reading...) Read more
April 6, 2011 - Posted on behalf of Jason Zhang and Joseph Rabaiotti, Malware Research Analysts, Symantec.cloud Portable document format (PDF) is one of the most commonly used file formats with which to exchange electronic documents across platforms and applications. Because (continue reading...) Read more
October 4, 2010 - In a previous blog we reported on how attackers use social engineering techniques to scare users into purchasing a misleading application. This time around, we have come across a couple of websites that are using a slightly different trick (continue reading...) Read more
September 1, 2010 - In previous blogs we have discussed how malware can exploit a search engine’s indexing features in order to spread malicious content. Recently we have observed a massive compromise of websites under the .ch and .nl top-level domains, aimed (continue reading...) Read more
June 2, 2010 - Introduction We post a lot of blogs here about all kinds of threats, including pervasive botnets, rootkits, rogue apps, the latest flavor of spam doing the rounds, and so on and so forth. So, for a change I thought I’d (continue reading...) Read more
April 22, 2010 - Always ever ready to pounce on any major new events, the creators of rogue antivirus software are quick to seize on the latest major news event to try and push their wares on unsuspecting users. In this case the latest (continue reading...) Read more
April 7, 2010 - Antivirus XP 2010, a clone of the Antivirus2010 family, is amongst today’s most prevalent rogue security software. Fake security software scammers continue to release new clones in frequent attempts to evade antivirus scanner detections. New clones share the same user (continue reading...) Read more
March 22, 2010 - Yesterday there was a volcanic eruption in Iceland near the Eyjafjallajoekull glacier that has led the Icelandic authorities to declare a state of emergency in southern Iceland. People living nearby have been evacuated in case of glacial melt water (continue reading...) Read more
February 3, 2010 - (continue reading...) Read more
January 28, 2010 - Yesterday we saw SEO poisoning attacks when searching for keywords such as "Apple Tablet". Now, after the product announcement has been made, we are seeing the same attack with the actual name of the product included in the search term. Using (continue reading...) Read more
January 21, 2010 - On the heels of having learned that Gumblar infected three Japanese websites late last year, MesageLabs Intelligence has tracked Gumblar’s latest activity which has been heavy over the past few days, especially on 17 January when it represented 25 percent (continue reading...) Read more
January 21, 2010 - Did you follow the Senate race in Massachusetts between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley? Well, so did cybercriminals. They likely had no interest in who won, however. What attracted them was how many of us were performing online searches, looking (continue reading...) Read more
January 20, 2010 - Posted on behalf of Dan Bleaken, Malware Data Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services The Haiti earthquake happened at 21.53 GMT on Tues Jan 12. It wasn’t long before we saw something related in spam, about 24 hours in fact. Spammers, almost without (continue reading...) Read more
January 20, 2010 - AntiVirus Live, Personal Security, Malware Defense, and Desktop Defender These are all names for different rogue security software programs. We identified 250 different “brands” of these bogus products in the Rogue Security Software Report published in October 2009. But these (continue reading...) Read more
January 15, 2010 - On 31 December 2009 MessageLabs Intelligence began tracking a new botnet, named 'Lethic'. At that time, it accounted for 2.5 percent of all spam. On 1 January 2010 it rose to just under 4 percent of all spam and carried (continue reading...) Read more
January 14, 2010 - Posted on behalf of Mathew Nisbet, Malware Data Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services People all over the world are currently feeling a great deal of sympathy for the people of Haiti, who were recently hit by a severe earthquake. Humanitarian aid is (continue reading...) Read more