Looking beneath the surface - the F-Secure 2006 Data Security Wrap-up

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.

About F-Secure Corporation

F-Secure Corporation protects consumers and businesses against computer viruses and other threats from the Internet and mobile networks. We want to be the most reliable provider of security services in the market. One way to demonstrate this is the speed of our response. According to independent studies in 2004, 2005 and 2006 our response time to new threats is significantly faster than our major competitors. Our award-winning solutions are available for workstations, gateways, servers and mobile phones. They include antivirus and desktop firewall with intrusion prevention, antispam and antispyware solutions, as well as network control solutions for Internet Service Providers. Founded in 1988, F-Secure has been listed on the Helsinki Exchanges since 1999, and has been consistently growing faster than all its publicly listed competitors. F-Secure headquarters are in Helsinki, Finland, and we have regional offices around the world. F-Secure protection is also available as a service through major ISPs, such as France Telecom, TeliaSonera, PCCW and Charter Communications. F-Secure is the global market leader in mobile phone protection provided through mobile operators, such as T-Mobile and Swisscom and mobile handset manufacturers such as Nokia. The latest real-time virus threat scenario news are available at the F-Secure Data Security Lab weblog at http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/

For more information, please contact:

Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer
Tel. +358 40 064 8180
Email: firstname.lastname@f-secure.com