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
