You might find it hard to believe, but that’s the number of new unique malware samples we detect on average every day in the wild. During the second half of 2008 our products detected a total of nearly 95 million unique malicious files. The total number...

AutoRun is the ability for a device, through the use of autorun.inf, to expose a set of tasks for the user to choose upon insertion of new media into the computer. This could be a USB drive, a CD or DVD, a network drive, or any other additions of new...

--Rdy all? --Mode -AP --Starting in 5 --4 --3 --2 --1 This is the typical scene in DOTA before a game starts. DOTA (Defense of the Ancients) is a very popular custom- made scenario map for Warcraft III. Popular enough that there is even a hit song...

Vundo is a malware family that doesn't need any introduction. It was one of the families added into the MSRT and remains in the top 10 detections every month. It is commonly reported as a nuisance due to the incessant popups that it delivers to the...

Depending on your background, you may find different sections of the newly published Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIR) to be of more interest. In today’s post, we would like to highlight the section on infection rates based on the operating...

The MSRT added the following threat families in 2H08. Rogues and botnet malware were the focus during the six months. New Family Note Added in Computers Cleaned by the MSRT in 2H08 Win32/Horst CAPTCHA...

It’s pretty obvious that people often behave differently at home and at work. Microsoft has found that malware and potentially unwanted software are encountered differently and act differently in the two environments. The following graph shows the...

Paladin describes a set of internal tools that automate the steps a researcher would take to understand how a given exploit takes advantage of a given vulnerability. As of today, these tools are not for public consumption. These tools take as input...

The family added to the April MSRT release is Win32/Waledac . If you haven't heard of the family before, there is a chance you may have seen some of the spam generated by Win32/Waledac in your inbox. We've blogged about some of the spam campaigns in the...

Customers often look for information about malware that may affect them. For the last couple of years, we have shown that malware doesn’t spread evenly across the globe, despite the global nature of the Internet. Threats that rely on social engineering...

As Vinny mentioned in his post , the data in our recently released Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIR) clearly shows what we've been seeing in our day-to-day research over the last six months or so - rogue security software is getting more prevalent...

There have been new developments in the Conficker arena within the past couple of days. We would like to inform those who are concerned that the MMPC is working to make sure you have the information you need, first to be protected from any threat; and...

Over the last couple of days we've seen some spam claiming to be from Microsoft, providing a free scan to remove Conficker . Here's an example: The link actually takes you to a typical fake online scanner page used to serve up a rogue security scanner...

Here at the Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) we look for ways to share the valuable data, insights and expertise that we have with our customers on a regular basis. We just released the sixth volume of our Microsoft Security Intelligence Report...

Hide behind huge numbers, making fighting against very expensive Birthday problem or paradox is the probability that, from a given set of people, two of them will have the same birthday. It is a paradox because the result defies common sense. For a...