Symantec

Smarter routers with swifter response to malware and IoT exploits are a growing segment now, and Norton is wading in with its own striking wireless router. The Norton Core not only looks like a miniature Spaceship Earth from Epcot, but inside the geodesic dome there's a mixture of parental filters, real-time security scans, and automatic updates. Even the shape has been designed with practicality in mind.

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Today the folks at Symantec have reported their discovery of the malware known as Regin. This software is detected by Symantec and Norton products as "Backdoor.Regin", and it seems clear that given the complexity of the hack, a nation state is likely responsible for its creation. This software is extremely "low key", meaning it can remain undetected for several years in a system, and even if it IS detected, it's not always possible to find out what its been up to.

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Malware, even the spying kind, isn't uncommon, but it is quite rare to come across something as complex, modular, sophisticated, and long-lasting as the Backdoor.Regin that Symantec uncovered. This particular Trojan has managed to evade detection and forensic tools and in fact might still have some form out there. And it has been going around since circa 2008. This makes it a very dangerous tool in the hands of the very wrong people, and a bit of speculation suggests that it might indeed be the work of a nation state.

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The Google Play store is no stranger to malware-infested apps or scam related apps, so we can add this one onto its list. According to its research, Symantec states that there are over 200 apps in the Google Play store that scam people into paying money in order to view adult-rated videos. They have discovered that there are at least 50 developers involved in the scam, and their apps have been downloaded at least 5,000 times in the past couple of months.

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Researchers from Symantec have uncovered more information about Stuxnet, the virus that was used to damage Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities back in 2007. The Stuxnet virus was speculated to be created solely to damage the nuclear plants in Iran. In an 18-page report by Symantec, it turns out that the existence of Stuxnet dates back to 2005. The virus was called Stuxnet 0.5 at the time, but there isn't any word yet on whether or not this version of the virus was used to do any damage.

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This week the Botnet known as Bamital has been reported dead by the two warriors that claim to have killed it: Symantec and Microsoft. This report shows that the death of said botnet will take down its abilities in full: hijacking search results galore being the main evil this Bamital creature was working with. Each time a user in the line of fire searched for something using search engines from whens they'd be sent to a malicious 3rd party site, having malware installed from that point.

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In case you don't remember, today is Guy Fawkes Day. Anonymous is trying to make sure that you remember the fifth of November, taking to Twitter today to announce that it has hacked PayPal and made off with nearly 28,000 passwords. According to The Next Web, Anonymous posted these passwords (along with usernames and telephone numbers in some cases) to Private Paste, though at the time of this writing the page linked to by the AnonymousPress Twitter account has been taken down. [UPDATE: PayPal responds below.]

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Customers were not happy after security firm Symantec made a recent update to its antivirus software, causing some Windows-based PCs to crash repeatedly, showing a dreadful “blue screen of death” in many cases. The company released a statement on its website saying it received a number of reports with machines running Windows XP that were continuing to show the blue screen after rebooting.

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Anti-virus firm Symantec has just issued its annual Security Threat Report for 2011, revealing an 81 percent increase in the number of malicious attacks last year and a 20 percent drop in the number of vulnerabilities. The company also noted that the cyber attacks that primarily targeted larger organizations had shifted their focus to small and mid-sized businesses. Mobile vulnerabilities also grew tremendously with Google's open Android platform a prime target.

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The cleanup of the latest Mac malware dubbed Flashback has been underway for a few weeks now. Originally, the malware was estimated to be infecting 600,000 Mac computers. The cleanup is going well, but still has a ways to go according to Symantec.

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This week a couple of names in information security and the hacking of said information have popped up in relation to one another once again, Symantec accusing certain downloads of Anonymous web tools of containing malware in and of themselves. It is with the tools in question that the utterly massive hacker collective known as Anonymous is able to carry out DoS attacks with the help of users all around the world. What Symantec is saying today is that these tools, or at least some versions of the downloads of these tools, also contain malware that infects the user's own machine at the same time as they attack others.

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Even though software company Symantec released a patch for its pcAnywhere program after it was infiltrated by hackers, as many as 200,000 computers are still running the infected version, including thousands that may have access to credit card and other sensitive data. These numbers are according to Rapid7, which surveyed the Net for computers that were running unpatched versions of the software.

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