Posted on behalf of Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services

I never like to dwell on the past. But as I reflect more on what an eventful year 2009 has been, there are some highlights worth noting. I don’t look at it as dwelling as much as I do learning from the past to further build and tone our Intelligence muscle.

Based on the MessageLabs Intelligence 2009 Annual Security Report, below are the security highlights of 2009.

2009 Highlights

Notable ISP Shutdowns : The shutdown of botnet hosting ISPs, such as McColo in late 2008 and Real Host in August 2009 appeared to make botnets re-evaluate and enhance their command and control backup strategy to enable recovery to take hours, rather than weeks or months.

Botnets Ruled the Threat Landscape: Botnets continued to rule the cyber security landscape in 2009 with the...

This post is made on behalf of my colleague Mat Nisbet, Malware Analyst for Symantec Hosted Services.

As of November 18, we have noticed a huge jump in the number of spam e-mails that contain a link to Twitter. Normally there is a tiny fraction of a percent, but on November 18 it jumped to 4 percent of all spam. This new surge is entirely from the DonBot botnet.

The apparent aim of these e-mails is to get people to fall for “get rich by working at home” schemes where the victim is encouraged to pay an initial fee for a trial and then sit back and watch the cash come in. Though easily stopped by us, this new run of spam uses a number of techniques to attempt to get past basic filters. Firstly, the body of the e-mail is simply an image (of a fake newspaper article), to try and get past text-based...

This post is made on behalf of my colleague Manoj Venugopalan, Malware Analyst for Symantec Hosted Services.

AutoIT, a free automation language for Windows platform-based development, is often used for scripting Windows-based applications and sometimes misused for creating malware. AutoIT scripts can be compiled into a compressed, standalone executable which will run without an interpreter. Auto2Exe is the application used to compile the AutoIT script into a standalone executiable.

Most of the malware based on AutoIT is in the form of worms and Trojans. Many such worms are well-known for logging into a user's IM client, changing their status message and then sending copies of the malware to all of the "buddies" in the victim's list.

MessageLabs Intelligence recently discovered an AutoIT Trojan using IRC (online chat) to connect an infected machine to a command and control channel without the user's knowledge. The malware is...