So, it's Tuesday morning in London town and I've been up since 6:00 a.m. staring at a monitor, trying to free myself from PowerPoint hell (it's all rock and roll I tell ya!). Anyway, this morning I stumbled across an InfoWorld article entitled “Hackers to target mobile banking, study says.” This article seems to have been spun out of a press release by the Tower Group entitled “Increases in Mobile Fraud and ID Theft Could Hamper Mobile Payment / Banking Initiatives.” The press release, in turn, references a report entitled “Fraud, Virus and ID Theft: Mobile Malware Stands to Create a New Beginning.” While I've not read the report and may not agree with the notion that security issues hamper payment / banking initiatives (just look at the world that is the Internet—yeah, security really hampered that...

The Symantec Messaging and Web Security team started off 2007 with the release of a new monthly report geared towards the media. This report, entitled The State of Spam: A Monthly Report was released last week, covers December 2006, and can be found here.

Do you want to know what the top spam type for last month was? Or how about what new techniques spammers are currently using? Did you see some unusual spam in your Inbox? Check out our report and see if it's a new trend. People interested in what’s going on in the ever-changing world of spam will want to get their hands on a copy of this report for the metrics, latest trends, new spam examples, and data points of interest.

Have you noticed more spam? You're not going crazy. Symantec AntiSpam tracking has shown an increase in spam by over 15 percent from the month of October to mid-December. In...

We’re happy to report that so far today, Peacomm and Mixor.Q activity is lighter than the maelstrom of activity we’ve seen in previous days. We’ve noted no new spam runs today, with the malware submissions and activity levels tapering off a bit as well. Phew! Our Security Response team in Pune, India, has pulled together a slick Flash-based run through of the attack, which can be viewed using the following URL:
http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/home_homeoffice/media/flash/peacomm.html

Just a little more info on this threat you may have not heard before—it is communicating over peer-to-peer using the Overnet protocol and network (of eDonkey fame). After connecting to the network, the threat then searches for some particular hashes (searches are done by hash, not by specific filename) and eventually it receives a reply that includes some 'meta tag' information...

We’ve seen many threats using vulnerabilities based on MicrosoftOffice documents over the last year, so it’s no surprise that we haverecently observed new samples of a threat that follows the same theme.This threat named Trojan.Mdropper.W is using the new Microsoft Word 2000 Unspecified Code Execution Vulnerability (BID22225)to drop threats onto a compromised computer. When the infected Worddocument is opened, it uses an exploit to drop some files onto thecomputer. These files are back door Trojans that enable an attacker togain remote access to your computer.

This vulnerability comes on the back of three other recent and unpatched Microsoft Word vulnerabilities, which are:

BID21518 (CVE-2006-6456)
...