Malware authors don’t miss any major event in their attempts to spread malware. Evidently, they see the upcoming New Year as yet another opportunity to get their creations into unsuspecting users' computers. We have already seen signs of malware...

Last November, Microsoft released security bulletin MS10-087 , which addresses a number of critical vulnerabilities in how Microsoft Office parses various office file formats. One of them is CVE-2010-3333 , "RTF Stack Buffer Overflow Vulnerability," which...

It was my first night in Beijing for a long-overdue vacation. I purchased a SIM card from the airport and sent SMS greetings to friends and family and other families in town. SMS is hugely popular and a main communication channel in China. Guess what...

This month, the MSRT team has added the Win32/Qakbot family of backdoors to its detections.  Qakbot is composed of several components, including a keylogger, a password stealer and a user-mode rootkit.  Qakbot is commonly distributed as the...

The Microsoft Malware Protection Center has been tracking a recent 0-day vulnerability for Microsoft Internet Explorer very closely after it was found in the wild in early November, apparently being used in targeted attack attempts.  As public exploit...

It's a normal day to us. We receive a new Bamital virus sample report from a customer, and we provide an analysis. Suddenly, something interesting bursts into my eyes: What's your thought on this code fragment? At the first glance, this piece of...

Initially it was "System Defragmenter", then "Scan Disk" and now it's called "Check Disk". While the name will most certainly change again, the main goal of Trojan:Win32/FakeSysdef will surely remain the same: to trick you...