Outsourcing your company’s security demands a supplier that is big enough, resilient enough and secure enough to do the job properly. This is why Symantec.cloud invests so heavily in its infrastructure. Our global footprint includes 18 data centres across four continents, two network operating centres and thousands of servers handling email, Web, and instant messaging traffic.

Whitelisting has been a buzzword used in the industry for the past 18 months or so, and is seen by some as a Panacea to beat Malware spreading within organisations and control threats inside your environment. Indeed, some of Symantec’s products use Whitelisting as an additional method of controlling software behaviour and limiting the applications that employees can or cannot use.

Whitelisting generally involves a process of learning exactly which applications, operating system components and hardware drivers are installed on a server or workstation, collating that information centrally, and then allowing an administrator to approve or deny the use of these tools.

Once this process has initially completed, enforcement of this list of applications is then applied to the target machines. Theoretically, this has given control back to the organisation in relation to what software is allowed to run on the corporate computers.

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I. BACKGROUND:
We have been receiving a few scattered cases of outbreaks from a file labeled snkb00ptz.exe or snkb0ptz.exe, but it seems to be on the rise.

It's normally considered poor troubleshooting to use the file name for any type of identification of a threat, but recent examples have made this practical. Even though these files were detected as many different threat names and families (Trojan.gen, w32.IRCBot.NG, Downloader, etc), the cases all reported the same behavior and symptoms.

After some additional investigation, Symantec Security Response has broken out detection for W32.Inabot. That's short for the Insomnia IRC bot. More information is available from the makers of this threat in their manual, here: http://pastebin.com/dvpu8Zwb

For those of you familiar with W32.Changeup, much of this...