Hello, welcome to this month's blog on the Microsoft patch release. This month the vendor is releasing six bulletins covering a total of 19 vulnerabilities. Seven of this month's issues are rated ’Critical’.

As always, customers are advised to follow these security best practices:

• Install vendor patches as soon as they are available.
• Run all software with the least privileges required while still maintaining functionality.
• Avoid handling files from unknown or questionable sources.
• Never visit sites of unknown or questionable integrity.
• Block external access at the network perimeter to all key systems unless specific access is required.

Microsoft's summary of the November releases can be found here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms12-Nov

The following is a breakdown of the issues...

With this year quickly coming to an end, it’s time for us at Symantec to publish our predictions on what we expect will happen in the world of cybersecurity for the coming year.

Most of us at Symantec tend to be fact-based, data-driven individuals. However, predicting the future always involves a bit of speculation. To derive our predictions for 2013, we began by talking to hundreds of security experts at Symantec to gather their thoughts and ideas. Then, we peer-reviewed these ideas, argued a lot, and boiled it all down to a handful of predictions that we felt would provide real insight into where we believe the threat landscape is going.

While these predictions are based on what we see today, they also reflect where we think things are going based on our years of expertise, our understanding of threat evolution, and our experience in previous cybersecurity trends.
 

1. Cyber conflict becomes the norm
   In 2013...

Ransomware is a type of malicious software that disables the functionality of a computer in some way and demands a ransom in order to restore the computer to its original state. Recent variants use law enforcement imagery to add legitimacy to the warning messages. The malware uses geo-location services to determine the location of the computer it is running on and then, after locking the computer displays a message appropriate to that country. The message usually claims that the user has broken the law by browsing some illegal material. Figure 1 is an example of a ransomware variant that displays a message claiming to be from the FBI.

Figure 1. An example of a ransomware message

The message states that in order to unlock the computer, “a fine” must be paid using one of...

Many Android apps contain advertising modules provided by third parties in order to monetize their development efforts. Airpush is a company that produces one of the more aggressive advertising modules. Their advertising modules can place ads in the Android notification bar where users are alerted to events such as missed messages or missed phone calls.

Unfortunately, in the most common versions of Android, the notification bar fails to show the user which app actually generated the advertisement. Since these advertisements can appear when the user is not actively using the app, there may be confusion on how to stop the advertisements from appearing in the notification bar. It is worth noting that changes have since been made by both Google and Airpush to better link advertisements directly to apps.

Many users disapprove of this model of advertising which has resulted in a controversy causing waves of not-so-good ratings and comments for some apps. This has prompted...