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: Tony Millington 07 Dec 2011

  A New Zero Day PDF Exploit used in a Targeted Attack

  With contributions from Manoj Venugopalan, Senior Malware Analyst, Symantec Introduction A new day and a new zero day PDF exploit used in a Targeted attack which our Skeptic heuristic engine stopped. This one exploits a vulnerability in the 3D engine in Adobe Reader (CVE-2011-2462 http://www.adobe.com/support/security/advisories/a...) which is often used to display a 3D wire mesh object that you can rotate and view from all angles in real time. An architect might use it to mock up a plan for a building that the customer can view from within the PDF, very cool. However, the more functions you add to your software, the more chance there is to exploit the format. Details The targeted attack against Adobe Reader 9.4.6 on Windows was sent in 5 emails originally on the...
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  Created: Paul Wood 06 Dec 2011

  Symantec Intelligence: November sees a four-fold increase in the number of daily targeted attacks since January

  Global spam is now at the lowest it has been since November 2008, when the rogue ISP McColo was closed-down. The effect on spam volumes back then were very dramatic and spam accounted for 68.0% of global emails. More recently the decline has been much slower, but spammers have also adapted to using more targeted approaches and exploiting social media as alternatives to email. Moreover, pharmaceutical spam is now at the lowest it has been since we started tracking it, accounting for 35.5% of spam, compared with 64.2% at the end of 2010. With targeted attacks and advanced persistent threats being very much in the news this year, we thought it would be a good time as the end of the year draws closer to begin our review of targeted attacks and look more closely at what has been described as “advanced persistent threats” or APTs for short. Terms such as APT have been overused and sometimes misused by the media, but APTs are a real threat to some companies and...