Symantec Intelligence

The Symantec Intelligence Blog published by Symantec.cloud serves as a conduit for communicating Intelligence data, trends and statistics based on analysis of cyber security threats, trends and insights from the Symantec Intelligence team comprised of many world-renowned malware and spam experts. Sitting on the front lines of defense, they have a global view of threats across multiple communication protocols drawn from the billions of web pages, email and IM messages they monitor each day.

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  Updated: Paul Wood 19 Sep 2011

  Nimda – the worm finds new tricks

  The word ‘Nimda’ may not be the most well remembered in the cyber-crime hall of fame but as malicious worm outbreaks go, Nimda certainly contributed to the malware landscape and was able to cause havoc on 18 September, 10 years ago in 2001. Long before cloud based security services were the norm and virus scanning was only performed once a week, the Nimda worm was effectively unleashed onto the global computer network exactly a week after the 9/11 atrocities. Because of this timing, some media quickly began speculating a link between the worm and Al Qaeda, although this rumour was quickly quashed by the FBI, but it did highlight the fact that cyber warfare can be a real threat carefully orchestrated by sophisticated cyber gangs or even terrorists and not script kiddies tucked away in dormitories. The Nimda worm came hot on the heels of the “Code Red” scare in August 2001, when a variant of the original worm infected more than 250,000 machines...
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  Updated: Paul Wood 10 Feb 2011

  10th Anniversary of the Anna Kournikova virus

  Q. What’s the only computer virus to ever appear in an episode of Friends? A. The Anna Kournikova virus (celebrating its tenth birthday on February 11, 2011) 10 years ago, on 11 February 2001, the Anna Kournikova virus swept the internet, tricking email users everywhere into opening a mail message that appeared to contain a picture of the famous Russian tennis beauty. Instead of providing the image promised, the virus plundered the user’s email inbox, accessed their address book, and sent itself to every contact in it. The virus wreaked such havoc that our analysts at the time commented that it was "spreading twice as fast as the Love Bug", the notorious ILOVEYOU virus we identified before anybody else back in 2000. The Anna Kournikova virus - or Vbs.SST@mm to use its full Symantec virus name -...