For the first time, Symantec Corp. publicly released a detailed report of its findings about the “Underground Economy” (cyberworld) through its observations between July 2007 and June 2008. Though this report was released nearly two months ago, I came across it only now.
Read the Symantec Report on the Underground Economy or listen to the corresponding Symantec podcast by Zulfikar Ramzan, the Security Technology & Response Technical Director.
Symantec estimates the value of total advertised goods on the underground servers as up to $276 Million and this figure is from only the underground they had access to. Mr. Ramzan said in the …read more

Microsoft released a huge security update, its biggest in five years, containing 28 packages of which 23 are marked “critical”. You better run the Windows Updates immediately; I am right now.
There is a Firefox trojan that is trolling around stealing passwords. Read the Larry Seltzer’s post for the story and a suggestion.
Friend Brian got numerous cases with a variant of Win32/FakeSecScan virus in the last couple of weeks and so compiled a helpful one-page PDF called “Beware of Fake Antivirus Programs” (PDF link warning). I have one more thing to add. When you see that popup message, open the taskmanager and kill the …read more