In this month’s report, we find that the email malware rate has dropped significantly since December, where only one in 400 emails containing a virus in January. This is the lowest virus rate we’ve seen since 2009. It could indicate that email virus distributors took a break after the holiday season, or that they have continued to migrate away from email as a choice for malicious payload delivery. We’ll watch this trend carefully to see if it continues to drop off.

In other news this month, Valentine’s Day spam is in full swing. Such spam generally arrives as an ecard during this time of year, preying upon a potential victim’s curiosity about a potential secret admirer—a situation where a legitimate email would likely arrive unsolicited in the first place. Unfortunately many such emails around this time of year do not lead to unexpected romance, but rather fake bargains, phishing attempts, or malicious code. More details on these scams can...

It seems that everywhere you turn this year, there’s news of another data breach. Sometimes it’s a laptop stolen, other times it’s hackers compromising a database. No matter how they occur, each breach leads to someone’s identity being exposed. Whether or not this exposure leads to identity theft, there’s no doubt that the risk involved, and the frequency that these breaches are occurring makes data breaches one of the top security issues of 2012.

In this month’s Symantec Intelligence Report, we examine the types of data that is often stolen during a data breach. It turns out the most commonly stolen information is more personal than you might first expect: a person’s real name is more likely to be stolen than a username or password.

Overall, the median...

In this month’s report we investigate a new social networking avenue that scammers are attempting to leverage: Instagram. They’re doing so in order to gather personal details and persuade users to sign up for premium-rate mobile services, among other things, generally by creating fake accounts:

The scams take on a number of forms, from spam comments, to fake followers, to liking photos in the hopes people will check out their profiles, which in turn often contain more spam links.

We’ve also noticed a significant drop in email spam volumes this month. The global spam rate has dropped by more than 10%, from 75% of email traffic in September, down to 64.8% in October. It’s good news overall, resulting in a 50 percent drop in spam volume over a two-month period.  We take a look at some of the likely causes for...

In this month’s report, we take a look at an often-overlooked side of malicious code: how attackers administer the Web servers that they use to spread spam and malicious code. We highlight a PHP-based tool in particular that is often used to control and manipulate the configuration of these Web servers.

The tool can run arbitrary PHP code, brute force file transfer and database accounts, and even allows quick access to Web server configuration files so that the attacker can edit them in order to suit their malicious needs. The attacker can easily obfuscate his or her code, making its function less apparent if viewed by the legitimate server admins. We’ve witnessed this tool being used to create spam-related websites and hosting exploit pages to compromise further computers.

We also take a look at a rather interesting Android application that attempts to trick the user into thinking that they can charge their device with nothing but the rays of the sun. The...