Security Response

Have you ever had a hard drive failure? I have. It happened to me in my first ever computer job.  I was about six months in, working on a small part of a big project, and we had a milestone in two days when it happened. I can remember the pit in my stomach as I checked our version control software for anything I had submitted. I searched files on drives D through Z, hoping that I may have copied files over. I checked floppy disk after floppy disk for the code I brought home that one weekend. I was petrified. I would have paid a week’s wages to recover those files.

Hard disk failures are a fact of life in the tech world. It’s something many of us have experienced, and not with fond memories. Trojan.FakeAV writers are aware of this, and the end of last year saw a move by some into the creation of fake hard disk scanners and defragmentation tools, which we covered in Fake Disk...

Over the last year, Symantec has blogged on the rise and fall of the Mariposa botnet. (What we detect as W32.Pilleuz.) Today, we’re going to talk about an interesting aspect of this threat—the ability to perform “cookie stuffing”. 

As delicious as it sounds, cookie stuffing is one of the subtler money spinning techniques used by malware writers. In order to explain the technique, let’s first look at the marketing model upon which it relies—affiliate marketing.

Let’s say I enjoy triathlons and that I’m a member of a “Symantec Triathlon Club” with the Web site symtriclub.com. This club is sponsored by fictional bike store that runs examplebikestore.com. If I see a link to examplebikestore.com while on symtriclub.com, click on it, and then make a...