Peter Coogan's blog

Contributors: Conor Murray, Paul Mangan.

As underhanded as it is, there are people out there who want to spy on other people’s smartphone activity. However anyone looking to invade the privacy of a smartphone user may just as likely find themselves becoming a victim of fraud.

The terms targeted attack, spear phishing, and advanced persistent threat (APT) get bandied around in the media a lot these days.

A digital currency known as Bitcoin (BTC) has been causing a bit of a media stir of late due to its use for illicit purposes.

Symantec’s telemetry has shown over 12 million Intrusion Prevention Signature (IPS) hits on sub domains of the ‘CO.CC’ domain in the last six months.

A new variant of the infamous Waledac worm has come to light due to our friends at Shadowserver.com. Symantec detects this variant as W32.Waledac.B.

The Zeus Trojan is back in the media spotlight once more, and for good reason.

A recent blog from our colleagues at Sunbelt highlighted a new Trojan botnet creator tool called "TwitterNet Builder." Symantec has detection in place for this threat as Trojan.Twebot.

In an earlier blog entry we mentioned SpyEye as a new, up-and-coming crimeware toolkit to look out for. In that blog we highlighted the Kill Zeus feature, which had just been added to the SpyEye Trojan builder at that time. We can now substantiate that this Kill Zeus feature does actually work.

Fake antivirus software (a.k.a misleading applications or rogue antivirus) is big business nowadays with Symantec reporting 43 million installation attempts from over 250 distinct programs between July 1, 2008, to June 30, 2009.