Whether a Montague or a Capulet, it never mattered to Juliet, as she made the case in Shakespeare's “Romeo and Juliet” when she says one of her most famous lines, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Earlier this week, we wrote about the increase in detections of a threat named W32.Changeup. Other vendors have written about it as well. However, each security vendor’s naming conventions are different. For Symantec, we named the threat W32.Changeup when we first discovered it.

Sampling of vendor detection names for W32.Changeup:

• Microsoft: Worm:Win32/Vobfus.MD
• McAfee: W32/Autorun.worm.aaeh
• Trend Micro: WORM_VOBFUS
• Sophos: W32/VBNA-X
• Kaspersky: Worm....

Over the past few months, we have blogged several times about OSX.Crisis and W32.Crisis. The Crisis malware is a highly advanced malware that has multiple infection vectors and a variety of information-stealing functions.

Figure 1. The Crisis infection routine

It targets Windows and Mac operating systems as well as devices running Windows Mobile. It can also sneak onto virtual machines if the compromised computer has a specific VMware virtual machine image installed on it and we believe that this is the first malware that can perform host-to-guest virtual machine infections.

Some...

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...