At the recent Virus Bulletin 2010 Conference in Vancouver, BC, I made a presentation highlighting infection data collected from the Malicious Software Removal Tool and data collected from Microsoft Security Essentials in its first year. The presentation...

Almost all major holidays are used by bogeymen (also known as cybercrooks) as an excuse to spread malware or spam using social engineering. This year is no exception, so we recommend that you be careful especially if you receive any Halloween themed emails...

Yesterday (Oct 26, 2010), MMPC researchers learned that the Nobel Peace Prize website " nobelprize.org " was hacked and users browsing the site using Firefox versions 3.5 and 3.6 may have received malware. The malware is delivered by way of...

Earlier this week (October 25), authorities in the Netherlands took action against one of the Win32/Bredolab botnets and person(s) who may be responsible for this threat as part of an investigation codenamed TOLLING- part of a larger project named TAURUS...

For those people who missed my presentation at Virus Bulletin this year, I co-presented on the topic of "proper" packer usage. The idea of a “proper” way to use packers is two-fold: (a) It reduces the prevalence of legitimate packers...

The latest Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIR) dedicates a whole section to botnets and the role they play in today's world of malware, and for good reason - the pathways of the malware world are quickly merging into a botnet superhighway, a...

Whilst working on our normal data pull and analysis for the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report ( v9 - released last week ), I embarked on a mini discovery mission on the exploit data that MMPC detects with our antimalware technology. Although the...

As those who follow our blog already know, we added Win32/Zbot to MSRT this month.  This is a complex threat with techniques employed to make removal by AV challenging and which necessitated advances in the technology we use.  The threat is...

Today, the 9th edition of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report was released as Adrienne Hall, General Manager of Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Communications, gave her keynote at RSA Europe.   This time around, we've done a few things differently...

This month, the MSRT team has added detection and removal for Zbot , one of the most widely known active botnets today. Although the malware itself is quite complex and varied, the technical acumen required to use and distribute it is actually quite low...

When people in the industry talk about intentional obfuscation using virtual machines, (note that these are not the same virtual machines as Virtual PC or VMware, but rather it's a technical term that was in use long before these products came into existence...

If you play Halo, you probably know that the Recon Armor is a rare armor variant that is only available to the makers of Halo, Bungie, and players who have unlocked all Vidmaster challenges in previous versions of the game. With the recent release of...