December 21, 2009 - Posted on behalf of Dan Bleaken, Malware Data Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services Symantec Hosted Web Security Service blocks millions of web requests every day to protect employees from content that is either against company policy, or malicious. In a typical week (continue reading...) Read more
December 21, 2009 - In a way, it's not much of a gift, since OnlineFamily.Norton is free. But hey, it's the thought that counts, right? And you (continue reading...) Read more
December 20, 2009 - Motive We recently had the opportunity to revisit a threat that first appeared on our radar back in May of this year. W32.Qakbot (hereafter referred to as Qakbot) is a somewhat benign worm that is capable of spreading through (continue reading...) Read more
December 18, 2009 - Spammers are recycling their old spamming methods after more than two years. Symantec reported an .mp3 version of pump-and-dump stock spam back in October 2007. In this recent spam attack, a small .mp3 file promoting a meds domain is (continue reading...) Read more
December 18, 2009 - Those looking to see the latest 3D blockbuster movie, The Avatar, on the cheap will have to take great care in what they search for. We have become aware of at least one site that has been rigged to redirect (continue reading...) Read more
December 17, 2009 - Posted on behalf of Dan Bleaken, Malware Data Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services MP3 Spam Returns to Attract Recipients to Canadian Pharmacy Website I remember the excitement in the MessageLabs anti-spam team when the first spam with an MP3 file was (continue reading...) Read more
December 17, 2009 - We have recently learned of yet another zero-day exploit in Adobe Acrobat. This time it's an overflow for a special type parameter in a function provided by the multimedia.api plugin that can be manipulated from JavaScript in the following (continue reading...) Read more
December 16, 2009 - We’ve monitored a great deal of Christmas sales spam (in English) for the upcoming holiday. Compared to English holiday spam, Chinese spammers seem to have fewer activities for Christmas, most likely because it is not a major holiday in the (continue reading...) Read more
December 16, 2009 - Didn’t shop enough on Black Friday? Still looking for Christmas Gifts? Need to send holiday greetings? Spammers will send them all at your convenience! We started seeing Christmas-related spam just after the Thanksgiving holiday—spammers are just as busy as the (continue reading...) Read more
December 16, 2009 - Posted on behalf of Mathew Nisbet, Malware Data Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services “Pump-and-dump” stock spamming is a technique that has been around for a long time now, where spammers attempt to artificially raise the price of a particular company’s shares. It (continue reading...) Read more
December 14, 2009 - Earlier today, we received a tip from a source that there is a possible Adobe Reader and Acrobat 0-day vulnerability in the wild. We have indeed confirmed the existence of a 0-day vulnerability in these products. The PDF files we (continue reading...) Read more
December 14, 2009 - Posted on behalf of Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services Without a doubt, 2009 was the Year of the Botnet. As reported in the MessageLabs Intelligence Annual Report, by the end of 2009, 83.4 percent of spam (continue reading...) Read more
December 14, 2009 - Notable highlights this month include the continuing shift of the region of message origin to APJ and South America, and changes in the average size of spam messages. • The EMEA region has been firmly displaced as the primary (continue reading...) Read more
December 13, 2009 - The AVAR 2009 Conference was held in the historical city of Kyoto, Japan from November 5. As this year's trend is cloud computing, fake antivirus software and massive PDF file attacks, the cloud and PDF topics were covered in (continue reading...) Read more
December 11, 2009 - The popularity of applications on social networking websites has increased a great deal this year. This has led to a new wave of phishing attacks targeting the users of these applications. Symantec has examined phishing websites exploiting three major social (continue reading...) Read more
December 11, 2009 - In a new wave of phishing attacks, Symantec has observed that attackers are targeting the FTP credentials of websites. The messages appear to come from various trusted Web hosting providers. So far we have observed that users of over 100 (continue reading...) Read more
December 11, 2009 - Posted on behalf of Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services I never like to dwell on the past. But as I reflect more on what an eventful year 2009 has been, there are some highlights worth noting. I (continue reading...) Read more
December 10, 2009 - In quality assurance circles at Symantec it is often stated that clean data (e.g. files from clean software) are to false positives as malicious data are to true positives. In simple terms this means that clean data helps us (continue reading...) Read more
December 9, 2009 - Ahoy there ye landlubbers! The high seas of wireless security appear to have gone commercial with the introduction of a paid service, which means it just got a whole lot easier for a casual attacker to break into your wireless (continue reading...) Read more
December 9, 2009 - Posted on behalf of Dan Bleaken, Malware Data Analyst Financial organizations undergo frequent changes from the point of view of their customers, whether it’s a change to security processes, takeovers, re-branding, new products and so on. Phish emails often contain generic (continue reading...) Read more