Antivirus News

Although the number of known viruses kept growing at a steady pace, year 2006 witnessed a remarkable step down in the volume of visible attacks by worms, viruses and other malware. At the same time, however, targeted attacks using backdoors, booby trapped document files and rootkits became increasingly commonplace. Also spam reached new record-breaking heights.

One of the largest email worm outbreaks in 2006, Warezov proved to be a lot more complicated than first imagined. A long running battle against it revealed a well orchestrated campaign to evade detection and generate a huge volume of spam.

Research by F-Secure has also revealed dangerous vulnerabilities in Cross Site Scripting (XSS) that threaten many of the most popular social networking sites. Could this be the next big thing for malware authors intent on unleashing a widespread web application worm?

Also in the mobile malware world, F-Secure has seen a steady rise in malware both adapted from existing code and entirely new. Investigations into mobile spyware also revealed a thriving industry for companies selling their wares to spy on other⿿s mobile phone transactions.

For more information about these and other stories, consult �??F-Secure 2006 Data Security Wrap�?�. In addition of being available for download as a PDF file, F-Secure has also prepared a video and audio Podcast versions of the wrapup, featuring Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen.

Please see http://www.f-secure.com/2006/2/ for more.