Mother’s Day is celebrated in many countries on May 12 and it’s a day for children, regardless of age, to express their love to their mother by giving her a gift. Spam messages related to Mother’s Day have begun flowing into the Symantec Probe Network. Clicking the URL contained in the spam message automatically redirects the recipient to a website containing a bogus Mother’s Day offer upon completion of a fake survey.

Figure 1: Survey spam targeting Mother’s Day

Once the survey is completed, a page is then displayed asking the user to enter their personal information in order to receive the bogus offer.

Figure 2...

If you haven’t heard, Google Glass, the latest gadget from the Silicon Valley giant, has set the media and tech world abuzz, with both admiration and controversy surrounding the device. Google Glass was released to the public last week and combines smartphone technology with wearable glasses that is reminiscent of something seen on Star Trek. Public, in this case, actually means beta testers (called Glass Explorers) who had to apply for the chance to purchase the spectacles in advance by writing a 50 word essay using the hashtag, #ifihadglass. Those chosen had the opportunity to purchase the device for $1,500 USD.

Along with the admiration of a device that appears to do everything, comes controversy.  The 8,000 individuals who were able to purchase the device were bound to a restrictive end user license agreement, in which the product would be deactivated and rendered...

For that past several days, Symantec has observed an increase in spam messages containing hexadecimal obfuscated URLs. Hexadecimal character codes are simply the hexadecimal number to letter representation for the ASCII character set. To a computer, hexadecimal is just one out of the many systems for address expressions on the Internet.

The following samples are different hexadecimal representations for http://www.symantec.com.

Hexadecimal only:

http://www.

symantec.co&#x006d

Hexadecimal and ASCII characters:   

(“http” and “com” are in ASCII characters and the...

Nearly every week now we can read about a data breach case somewhere, where millions of user accounts and potential other sensitive data has been compromised. Most people are not even shocked by such news anymore, as it is starting to become humdrum.

One of the most common attacks used in such breaches is an SQL injection. This attack has ranked first place on OWASPs Top 10 faults in Web applications for many years. There are several well-known methods to prevent SQL injections, but unfortunately it is still often encountered in productive sites. Furthermore, mis-configured Web servers and vulnerabilities in remote management tools can allow attackers to gain access to systems and read potentially sensitive files.

There has long been a heated discussion about how best to store passwords and that discussion is still ongoing. Most people agree that storing passwords in clear text in a database...