Symantec has just published one of its regular major security software reviews.

Symantec, developers of the Norton antivirus product range, publishes monthly security software reviews under the title of MessageLabs Intelligence Reports. One of the highlights of the report relates to botnets; the report suggests that almost 95% of spam is sent from a botnet, compared to 84% in April this year. More specifically, the report reveals that Rustock has kept its number one spot as the most common spam-sending botnet, responsible for 41% of botnet spam (up from 32% in April this year).

One reason behind Rustock’s increase in spam presence is that it no longer uses TLS encryption to send out spam; this speeds up connections and increases the amount able to be sent by the botnet. The figures for the use of TLS have dropped considerably; in March this encrypted spam was attributed to 30% of spam sent from all different kinds of sources, and 70% of spam sent from Rustock; this has dropped to 0.5% today.

Paul Wood, the MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services, explains: “It is likely that because TLS slow connections due to the additional encryption processing required to send a spam email, the botnet controllers realized that this tactic impeded their spam-sending capabilities,” Wood said. “As a result, Rustock’s dominance has never looked better as its spam-per-bot-per-minute rate more than doubled from 96 spam emails to 192.”

The report also highlights global variations in spam; the UK, it claims, is responsible for 4.5% of all the world’s spam, a percentage that has more than doubled since the month of April. Four of the top 10 spam sending countries (the UK, Germany, France and Italy) can now be found in Western Europe, showing a global shift in the sources of the most troublesome and high-volume spamming.

The MessageLabs Intelligence Report was not just focused on spam; it highlighted a number of other changes and developments in internet dangers. For example, viruses. They noted that the ratio of email-borne viruses in people’s day-to-day email traffic from new dangerous sources was down from July by 0.02%, at 327.6 emails in August. Phishing was also covered in the report, which revealed that 1 in 363.1 emails, which was a 0.10 percentage increase since July.

Geographical trends were also discussed extensively in the report; rises in levels in spam in countries such as Hungary, Hong Kong, Japan and China; the percentages of spam in emails in the US, Canada and the UK; and the sudden targeting of Oman with phishing attacks in the month of August. Vertical trends, such as the automotive sector being the most the spammed sector in industry (at 94.8%), and the Education sector being at a spamming level of 92.9%, were also discussed.

With its security software reviews, Symantec hopes to keep the using public in the know as to the various changes in threats and dangers in all sorts of areas, from spam to viruses.

Guest Article by Neil Camp

Internet security antivirus company Norton has just issued a study which discovered that one in every three top-trending search results delivered about 10% of malicious results, with the term ‘Red Hot Laugh Riot’ being one of the worse culprits.

The internet security antivirus company Norton’s study appears to have uncovered just how wide, extensive, and often bizarre this problem really is. ‘tropical dreams sweepstakes’, for example, produced what Norton reckons was a “staggering” 99 malicious links out of the first 100 indexed results.

This week the three top targets for malicious links were celebrity news gossip, gaming online, and the names of particular diseases: “constance francesa hilton” and “melorheostosis” topped the deadly list of search terms, managing to return malicious links in 45 per cent of the first 100 results. Hackers use rises in popular interest on particular subjects – whether they be international crises, song lyrics, celebrity gossip – to install malicious links into the search results.

So what has Norton done with the information garnered from this study? Norton has released the Norton Safe Web Lite, which can identify dangerous sites before you even click on them. This is a free downloadable tool that can be used with either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. This technology can be found in the Norton Internet Security and Norton 360 products, and provides a crucial barrier of defence from clicking unknowingly on risky sites.

Nearly 60 per cent of these ‘risky’ sites were discovered to contain drive-by downloads, which can infect people’s computers with ease and speed, often without them knowing.

This safety technology has been targeting one of the most popular websites of the day: Facebook. The Norton Safe Web scanner is also free, and by choosing the ‘Enable Auto-scan’ option, it can identify any dangerous links that may be posted on customer’s news feeds of Facebook ‘wall’.

Jens Meggers, vice president of engineering at Norton, says, “Cybercriminals are always looking for the next opportunity to find victims, as evidenced by the high volume of SEO poisoning. Unfortunately for consumers, simply searching for a popular topic and clicking on a poisoned link can have serious consequences. Consumers need to arm themselves with tools like Norton Safe Web Lite that are specifically designed to defend against these types of threats.”

The internet security antivirus company has been leading a number of studies to try to design and develop technology that helps users deal with this far-reaching problem.

Guest Article by Neil Camp

Norton has compiled a list of the top US kids online searches last year and near the top of the pile was the somewhat predictable searches for “sex” and “porn” which were number four and five respectively with those aged 18 and under.

Norton, which is the anti-virus software made by Symantec, make the point that whilst parents may live in hope their teenage offspring are searching for things like the blockbuster movie hit New Moon, or in the case of the seven and unders Sesame Street, their kids will also be finding out a few other things as well.

However, the good news is that the top three kids’ searches in 2009 were YouTube, Google and Facebook.

But Norton advises parents to be aware of what their children are searching for, as each of the first three choices above can of course lead to highly inappropriate content. They are also recommend using a software package to help parents keep an eye on their kids online searches. The Norton OnlineFamily is one such choice for those parents keen to get help.

And when the stats are shown for those searches including the words Sex and Porn, there seems little differences between the boys and the girls. For example, although for boys the search term sex came in at number four, for girls it was only one less at number five. In case you were wondering, girls put the search words Taylor Swift in at number four.

As for the boy’s top 25 searches, they were mostly concerned, apart from the adult related words, with social networking and shopping sites, and games. The girls also had a panache for social networking sites, but were more interested in music, TV, film and celebrity sites.

Not surprisingly perhaps, recently deceased pop mega star Michael Jackson was the most popular celebrity search last year with kids, coming in at number 12, with Taylor Swift at number 13. Other top celebrity searches included Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Lil Wayne, Megan Fox, Eminem, Beyonce, Britney Spears, Demi Lovato, the Black Eyed Peas, the Jonas Brothers, Rihanna, and Chris Brown.

Marian Merritt, Norton Internet Safety Advocate, said:
“When it comes to online threats, parents need to be concerned about more than just their child running into inappropriate content. What makes OnlineFamily.Norton unique is that it gives parents insight into kids’ online activities and what interests them most so that parents can ensure they have a discussion with them about topics they’re curious about, as well as protect them from cyber threats.”

Guest Article by Neil Camp

Learn how to control your kids surfing here

Computer security giant Symantec has launched the 2010 line-up of Norton products.

And, boast Symantec, Norton Internet Security 2010 and Norton AntiVirus 2010 are their best products yet. Rowan Trollope, senior vice president, Consumer Products and Marketing, Symantec, said:
“One in five people will become a victim of cyber crime.. “We know that hackers don’t destroy computers, they destroy lives. The powerful new reputation-based security in Norton 2010 gives people the power to deny digital dangers wherever they are found online.”

According to Symantec, the Norton 2010 products have maintained an eye on performance, in spite of adding significant new protection technology to the release. Independent third party test lab, PassMark Software, was commissioned to benchmark Symantec and top security software competitors’ performance impact on key metrics. Their main conclusions were:

• Fast install. Norton Internet Security 2010 installs in about a minute;
• Least working memory usage. Norton Internet Security 2010 uses just over 10MB;
• Fastest scan. Norton Internet Security 2010 scans in only 61 seconds on a hard disk drive and in only 31 seconds on an solid state drive.

But that’s not all. Symantec claim that the Norton Insight family of technologies in the new 2010 products uses extensive online intelligence systems to proactively protect the PC. This helps keep users informed of the security and performance impact of files and applications that they encounter in their everyday online experience.

Individual ‘intelligence’ components include:

• Norton Download Insight. This uses extensive online intelligence systems leveraging reputation to proactively protect a PC. Analyzes and reports on the safety of new files and applications before users install and operate;
• Norton System Insight. This provides features and easy-to-understand system information to help keep PCs performing at top speed. Automatic and on-demand application optimization rejuvenates application performance. Also provides a view of recent events on the computer, providing the information required to research and analyze PC issues. Performance graphs help pinpoint what’s causing a computer to slow down;
• Norton Threat Insight. This gives details on threats that have been detected on a PC – including useful information on where it came from (the URL) and when it was initially encountered;
• Norton Insight Network. This leverages a cloud-based approach unique to them, say Symantec. Based on the Quorum technology, it takes cloud-based security beyond traditional blacklists and whitelists. It uses a statistical analysis of file attributes based on billions of scans on millions of computers to identify the trust level of a file. This way Norton can identify files to be trustworthy, or untrustworthy, that would otherwise fall into the grey area of the unknown with only traditional security methods.

The Norton 2010 line-up also has a number of additional key technologies:

• SONAR 2. This is sophisticated second-generation behavioural security technology that detects entirely new threats based on their suspicious actions, without the need for traditional fingerprints. Leverages data from the reputation cloud, firewall, network communications, and file attributes such as location on the PC, to decide when to detect a program as a threat;
• New Antispam (Norton Internet Security only). This is a powerful enterprise-grade spam blocking engine helps keep a user clear of unwanted email and safe from email-based scams and infections. It is 20% more effective than the previous engine and requires no training;
• Norton Safe Web (Norton Internet Security only). This is a website rating service that annotates Google, Yahoo! and Live.com search results with site safety ratings to warn users about sites that may pose a danger to them. It also includes ecommerce safety ratings to help users make safer online shopping decisions;
• OnlineFamily.Norton (Norton Internet Security only). This is for Norton Internet Security 2010 and users can opt to try a subscription to OnlineFamily.Norton. This is a new Web-based service that keeps parents in the loop on their kids online lives and fosters communication about what’s appropriate and inappropriate behavior on the Internet.

Norton 2010 offers free technical support and continues to deliver free support to Norton 2010 customers across all available channels, via the web, email, chat or phone. All products support Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Guest Article by Neil Camp

Cyber crime has become bigger than drug trafficking for the criminal fraternity. Whats more, say security company Symantec who develop the Norton software range of anti-virus products, one in five people will become a victim of cybercrime in the future.

Symantec research has shown that every three and a half minutes a crime is committed on the streets of New York City, and that every two and half minutes a crime is committed on the streets of Tokyo. Compare that though with every three seconds an identity is stolen online; that’s nearly 10,512,000 identities each year.

And one of the real attractions for cyber criminals is not only the profitability of such crimes, but their anonymity as well, which makes online crimes much more difficult to prosecute than offline crimes.

In response, Symantec has launched a self-styled ‘crusade’ against viruses. It claims to be exposing the inner workings of one of the largest illegal industries in the world and in doing so, hopes to help provide the information that people need to stay protected through a collection of educational and actionable assets and corporate actions.

These include:

• Internet Black Market video series. These videos invite people to take a virtual tour and learn how the online criminal marketplace operates, including what is for sale and highlight the latest cyber thief schemes;
• Every Click Matters website. This takes what they claim to be an entertaining and educational look at the world of cyber crime, exploring digital dangers and who’s behind them, understanding whether cyber crime can actually do to people and educate them on what you can do about it;
• Norton Online Risk Calculator. Could be a useful add on as it offers a quick and free tool to evaluate a user’s risk level and provides an estimated value of their personal data to thieves in the criminal underground;
• “Cyber Crime Exposed” Booklet. This educates on the threat of cyber crime, the risk it poses and how to safeguard against it through simple everyday steps;
• Norton Internet Security 2010 and Norton AntiVirus 2010. Symantec lobbies governments and other agencies and organizations around the globe to support and influence legislation, policy and public education as it relates to online crime, Internet safety and privacy.
• Making it harder for cyber criminals to scam computer users. Symantec educate on the threat of cyber crime, the risk it poses and how to safeguard against it through simple everyday steps;
• Norton Internet Safety Advocate. Via one Marian Merritt who is a nationally recognized representative for Symantec’s ongoing efforts surrounding Internet safety. She works alongside educators and public and private organizations to help families enjoy the Internet safely and securely.

So there you have it; viruses are now more popular than drugs.

Guest Article by Neil Camp