Malware affecting thousands of office printers worldwide

A piece of malware known as Trojan.Milicenso thatoriginally surfaced in 2010 has been making a comeback over the past two weeks, primarily affecting office printers in the US, India, Europe and South America, according to Symantec. The resulting infection causes a massive amount of print jobs containing garbage characters to be sent to print servers, resulting in wasted ink and paper, not to mention causing headaches for uninformed office works and IT staff.

Symantec says that their initial inspection in 2010 revealed that Trojan.Milicenso was essentially a “malware delivery vehicle for hire” but the latest version is associated with Adware.Eorezo which is an adware that targets French speaking users.

The current iteration infects systems using traditional means including malicious email attachments or visiting a website that contains malicious scripts. Unsuspecting users are typically guided to dangerous websites by clicking links in an unsolicited email, Symantec says. Furthermore, they have also found that a large number of samples are being packaged as a fake codec.

The malicious code continues to send print jobs to the printer until it either runs out of paper or ink. Interestingly enough, the security company notes that this appears to be a side effect of the infection instead of the author’s intended goal of generating bogus ad clicks from serving up advertisements.

Symantec suggests that all users follow best security practices and keep anti-virus programs updated with the latest definitions.

Source : http://techspot.com

Symantec: spam nearing three-year low, targeted attacks on the rise

E-mail spam across the world is close to a three-year low, now accounting for 70.5 percent of all messages sent. That may sound like a lot until you consider that 90 percent of e-mail sent in 2009 was spam, according toSymantec’s November Intelligence Report.

The 25 page report also highlights that one in 302 e-mails was identified as a phishing attempt and one in 255.8 messages contained malware. Most alarming, however, is that nearly 5,000 malicious websites are blocked each day, an increase of 47.8 percent since October 2011.

Symantec reports that Russia was the most spammed region in November at 76.7 percent, followed closely by Saudi Arabia at 76.6 percent and China at 74.5 percent. The US had a 69.9 percent spam rate while Canada was slightly better at 69.5 percent.

Spam in general is on the decline but the same can’t be said for targeted attacks. As the name suggests, these attacks are sent to specific individuals within an organization with the initial goal of infecting and spreading to other systems on the network. The attacks use a variety of attack vectors, exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities over a long period of time. Once infiltrated, these attacks attempt to grant remote access to confidential data.

The top targets for these types of attacks include the government / public sector with 20.5 attacks per day and chemical / pharmaceutical industries who were targeted on average 18.6 times daily. Manufacturing and finance were key targets as well, attracting 13.6 and 11.8 attacks daily, respectively.