Posted on behalf of Tony Millington (Malware Operations Engineer, Symantec Hosted Services), with contributions from Dan Bleaken (Malware Data Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services)

Today we saw a targeted attack against seven different companies via email, sent mostly to Public Sector addresses, but also to the Education Sector. The attack began on February 16, but the fact that we've seen a targeted attack at all is not particularly interesting, we see targeted attacks every day: for example, in the month of January 2010 we stopped 1,976 confirmed targeted emails. The interesting part with this particular attack is that it is using the Bredolab malware as the payload in the email.

Bredolab (for more information click here) is usually spammed out in vast quantities using the Cutwail botnet (one of the largest botnets currently in...