With the soaring popularity of social networking sites, it is no surprise that spammers try to take advantage of them. In the past, spammers would register their own accounts and then send unsolicited messages through the social networking site. By default, the site generated automated email to let the user know that there is a new message. While such notifications are technically legitimate, the user would have most likely considered the messages as spam, due to the unsolicited content. For spammers, this technique had a shortcoming—the message sent to the user was from an unknown person/entity.

Recently, Symantec has observed a rise in a newer technique of social networking site abuse. The below example is a legitimate notification from Facebook that informs the user of a new private message:

As noted above, the message itself is not spam because...

As mentioned in a recent blog, Symantec is aware of the exploitation of a previously unknown and unpatched vulnerability affecting the Microsoft Video Streaming ActiveX control. Initially, there were limited in-the-wild attacks; however, new developments indicate that the flaw is now being exploited to great extent in China and other parts of Asia. Reports indicate that thousands of websites have been compromised and are now hosting the exploit for this issue.

Our tests show that Microsoft Windows XP systems are affected, while Windows Vista systems do not seem to be affected by the attack. The flaw lies in the “msvidctl.dll” library and can be exploited by providing a crafted file as input to the “data” parameter of the “BDATuner.MPEG2TuneRequest.1” ActiveX object. The object is associated with the following...

Yesterday at the RSA conference a group of Symantec executives and technologists met with industry influencers to discuss a broad collection of topics, ranging from innovation to reputation to virtualization. It was a pretty interesting discussion and I'd like to focus on one particular aspect that is near and dear to me—the importance of maintaining innovation momentum in a down economy. There are plenty of historical examples that show that companies that innovate through tough times emerge with a strong and sustainable advantage over those that don't. An interesting point, but I think there is more compelling evidence that sustained innovation is the smart thing to be doing right now.

Someone once said that there are two kinds of products in the world: those that cost a dollar but help you earn five dollars, and those that cost a dollar but help you save five dollars. Both are valid value propositions, but in this economy it's not too surprising that people are...

So this week is pretty exciting. For the third year in a row, we're going to be showing off a prototype at the DEMO conference. Two years ago we launched Identity Defender (I was part of that one), which went on to become Norton Identity Safe—a technology available today in our award-winning Norton Internet Security and Norton 360 products. Last year our Symantec Research Labs Advanced Concepts group unveiled Project Watchdog, which today is known as Norton Online Family and is currently in public beta. This year...