Malware madness and spammers in the slammer: The year in cybercrime

One of the most disturbing cybercrime trends in 2008, many security analysts say, has been the emergence of a full-blown underground economy where credit card information, identity theft information, and spam and phishing software are all available for relatively low prices.

Security software company Symantec became the latest company to raise red flags about what it called the "underground server" economy last month, when it issued a report estimating that roughly $276 million worth of goods and information is available on online black markets. Credit card data accounted for 59% of the information available for sale on underground servers, Symantec reported, with identity theft information (16%), server accounts (10%), financial accounts (8%) and spam and phishing programs (6%) trailing far behind.

Read more from Network World.

Pentagon Hit by Unprecedented Cyber Attack

"Due to the presence of commercial malware, CDR USSTRATCOM has banned the use of removable media (thumb drives, CDRs/DVDRs, floppy disks) on all DoD networks and computers effective immediately."

Read more from Fox News

What’s Travelling on the Wire (part 2)

Besides the “normal” attacks we’ve seen, the longest ones appear to be FTP dictionary-based attacks. These can take up to several minutes or more, as in some cases we’ve seen attacks with 10,000+ passwords.

Aside from the usual passwords (mostly common names/words) we’ve seen birthdates, comic books/movie characters (anyone fancy Batman, Spiderman or Shrek ? :D ), and even Internet browser names as passwords. As a concern for some admins, some of the commonly used passwords like “q1w2e3r4” were in the lists.

Read More from Microsoft® Malware Protection Center