2012 will be remembered as the year in which Android malware spread widely in Japan and may also be known as the year when some of the developers of the malware escaped punishment for performing the malicious activities.

On October 30, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police arrested a group of five individuals for their involvement in developing and distributing Android.Dougalek. Their goal was to collect personal information stored on Android devices. Coincidently, the Kyoto Prefectural Police also arrested two men on the same day, and then two more at a later date, for the development and distribution of Android.Ackposts, which was also used to steal personal information. Symantec welcomes this news and applauds the police for their efforts.

Symantec was able to assist the Tokyo...

Comparing variants of the same malware family can sometimes uncover interesting results. Trojan.Ransomlock, the highly profitable and prevalent malware, is one of those cases. This threat was originally spotted in Russia in 2009 but since then has been highly active in the wider world, particularly in the past few months.

An in-depth analysis of this month's AV detection stats for the Trojan.Ransomlock family of threats reveals two top variants: Trojan.Ransomlock.T and Trojan.Ransomlock.G.

Figure 1. Trojan....

While death and taxes may be certainties in our lives, in the digital world—especially in social networking—one certainty is spam.

I recently wrote about gift card spam targeting the popular photo-sharing application Instagram. The service now has over 100 million users and it recently surpassed Twitter with more average daily visitors (Figure 1). As the number of users of Instagram continues to increase, we expect to see a corresponding increase in Instagram spam.

Figure 1. Instagram daily visitor growth
 

Cash Rules Everything Around Me (C.R.E.A.M.)

While gift cards work quite...

In the last couple of years, we have seen highly sophisticated malware used to sabotage the business activities of chosen targets. We have seen malware such as W32.Stuxnet designed to tamper with industrial automation systems and other destructive examples such as W32.Disstrack and W32.Flamer, which can both wiped out data and files from hard disks. All of these threats can badly disrupt the activities of those affected.

Following along that theme, we recently came across an interesting threat that has another method of causing chaos, this time, by targeting and modifying corporate databases. We detect this threat as...