Security Response

In 2009, the Induc virus was the top new malicious code sample observed by Symantec worldwide. Notably, Induc does not actually do anything strictly malicious; all it does is propagate. No keystroke logging, no spam sending abilities, no ad clicking, and no destruction of data.

So what makes this virus interesting? All Induc does is propagate, but only on developer’s computers. Specifically, it does not do anything unless it detects an installation of versions 4 thru 7 of the Delphi® development environment. Delphi is a variant of the Pascal programming language originally developed by Borland and is meant to facilitate the development of applications for the Microsoft Windows platform. The targeted versions of Delphi were released between 1998 and 2002, but are still in wide use throughout the developer community....

I am proud to announce the release of Volume 15 of the Symantec Global Internet Security Threat Report. I would like to take this opportunity to give a preview of the some of the findings in the vulnerabilities section of this report.

In previous years, we observed that ActiveX vulnerabilities were on the rise. This trend was largely driven by security researchers employing various fuzzing tools to audit ActiveX controls for vulnerabilities. In 2008, 70 percent of all browser plug-in vulnerabilities could be attributed to vulnerable ActiveX controls. In 2009 there was a significant decline in the proportion of ActiveX vulnerabilities when compared to other browser plug-in technologies. In the report we observed that only 42 percent of browser plug-in vulnerabilities affected ActiveX controls. Vulnerabilities in other browser plug-ins increased as a result. In particular, Java SE accounted for 11 percent of browser plug-in vulnerabilities in 2008 but rose to 26...