I had the honor recently of moderating a virtual roundtable discussion on the top Internet security trends from 2009 and what we expect to see in the security threat landscape in 2010. Funny thing about security predictions—you hope they won’t come true, but expect them to anyway. The roundtable featured expert panelists Paul Wood (Senior Analyst, MessageLabs Intelligence, Symantec) and Zulfikar Ramzan (Technical Director, Symantec Security Response). They each have unique insights into the world of cybercrime, spam, phishing attacks, and other cyberthreats that plague us all.
 
We want to give a big thanks to everyone who joined in to listen to our experts, and we hope you found it interesting. For those of you who couldn’t make it, please take a few minutes to listen to the podcast of the actual roundtable.

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Zeus is a botnet package that allows for the easy creation and command and control of a botnet.  We've discussed Zeus previously in Zeus, King of the Underground Crimeware Toolkits. The main purpose of Zeus is to steal online credentials such as online banking passwords, but it can be configured to steal passwords from any online site. 

Today, the BBC is reporting that police in the UK have arrested two suspects in relation to Zeus. While the details are preliminary, the two likely appear to be users of the Zeus botnet package rather than the actual creators, and thus the prevalence and usage of Zeus is likely to continue.

We've created a research paper providing more in-depth information on Zeus, including how the bot is created, what functionality it has, and additional screenshots on...

The Security Response team has compiled the top security trends of 2009. We pulled data from the Global Intelligence Network and the experiences of the thousands of analysts and security experts at Symantec to come up with the top trends for the year. While none of these trends will be a surprise to anyone even casually following the threat landscape, when compiled and summarized, it is clear that the breadth of security problems in the past year was pretty stunning.

For example:

•    Toolkits and threat recycling have made malware easier to create than ever
•    Polymorphic technology is being applied to make threats harder to catch
•    Botnets, large and small, are used as the foundation of attacks making most attacks complex
•    All major news events are used for social engineering
•    Major brands are being appropriated by cybercriminals...

When trawling the Web today we came across a website that has been compromised and rigged so that it is returned in search engine results for many different search terms. The site in question belongs to a UK-based company that specializes in hiring out holiday homes and is a legitimate business. However, the site has been compromised and is being used in a major ongoing SEO-based misleading applications attack, and has been for some time now. As you can see in the sample search results below, you may wonder what college football, a Ukraine vs. Greece soccer match, Penn State basketball, and Robin Williams have to do with renting a holiday home—and with good reason, too.

The key to identifying malicious pages in the search results is...