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...

Some events familiar among people in the United States are commencing this month, including: Thanksgiving—a great occasion to thank dear friends and family for their kindness; and Black Friday—a day after Thanksgiving, usually the busiest retail shopping day of the year. Spam messages related to these events have begun flowing into the Symantec Probe Network. Many of the spam samples observed are encouraging users to take advantage of e-cards, clearance sales of cars and trucks, products bidding to get the best deals, replica watches. Clicking the URL will automatically redirect the user to a fake offer website.
 

Figure 1: An e-card for Thanksgiving...