More Storm activity spotted

The Storm worm is in amourous mood once again with a new wave of malware being sent from the botnet, according to security firm MessageLabs.

A network of PCs, under the control of cybercriminals but without the knowledge of their owners, is churning out spam emails containing a malicious file called iloveyou.exe.

With subject lines including 'With All My Love', 'If Loving You', 'With Love', 'We Belong together' and 'Our Love is Free', the spam emails use similar tactics to previous campaigns run by the Storm botnet which focused on Valentine's Day.

MessageLabs said that the main locations where the spam originates from include the UK, Russia, the US and the Netherlands.

Paul Wood, senior analyst at MessageLabs said: "This attack should serve as a warning shot to those who are not securing both their email and web traffic properly."

Three weeks ago, MessageLabs said that the botnet was reduced to just five per cent of its size in April, but rival security firm Symantec since claimed that the Storm worm was still evolving.

Last week, security firm Trend Micro said that it had seen the Storm botnet using a file that suggested that it was either targeting PCs that had an 'adware' program from Zango installed or had been employed by Zango to push the adware.

Zango has since denied that it had anything to do with the Storm botnet.

Original Story

Posted by Annette King in Virus & AntiVirus News at 15:33

Microsoft has just snared a U.S. patent for proactive virus protection, which is how security software helps secure your PC when it encounters shape-shifting malware not already in its antivirus definition file. What I want to know is, what does this mean for all the other vendors -- like McAfee, Symantec, Kaspersky, and Trend Micro -- that have been selling proactive protection software for years? Do they now have to pay Microsoft protection; I mean, royalties?

Here's the quick low-down on the new Microsoft patent. Issued on June 20, patent number 7,376,970 is entitled "System and method for proactive computer virus protection." The inventor is Adrian Marinescu, who was at one point (maybe he still is) a lead developer on the Windows kernel team, heavily involved in the heap manager. He previously worked on Windows NT's object manager, which is a key software traffic-cop managing the interaction among all the executive kernel subsystems. All this is by way of saying that Mr. Marinescu clearly knows his operating-system internals.

Posted by Annette King in NOD32 News at 14:38