Symantec Says Targeted Attacks Have Quadrupled

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Symantec says it is seeing four times as many targeted attacks as it did just one year ago. Quick, everyone panic and run out and buy Symantec's latest product! :p

"While the amount of global spam is at its lowest level since the McColo take-down in November 2008, the latest Symantec intelligence report shows a fourfold increase in the number of daily targeted attacks since January 2011," said Paul Wood, senior intelligence analyst at Symantec. "This is the greatest increase over a 12-month period ever recorded by Symantec."
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Darn Steve I was going to make that joke when I saw the thread title. I wouldn't put Norton on my computer if they paid me a million dollars....Well maybe for a million dollars, every single day I had to use that piece of shit.
 
I work in the IS dept for one of the top pharma companies. Lately we have been getting a huge amount of pc's and laptops hit with difficult spyware.

Normally we get the fake AV but over the course of about a month some harder ones have shown up.

The last one I cleaned off would make every important folder read only , take all the shortcuts in Start/Programs and hide them deep in a folder someplace so the user
would think ALL is lost.

Personally Im dealing with a real pain in the butt one , it keeps hitting me with changes to
desktop.ini and the location is c:\Windows\Assemby\GAC_32
 
poconopc said:
I work in the IS dept for one of the top pharma companies. Lately we have been getting a huge amount of pc's and laptops hit with difficult spyware.

Normally we get the fake AV but over the course of about a month some harder ones have shown up.

The last one I cleaned off would make every important folder read only , take all the shortcuts in Start/Programs and hide them deep in a folder someplace so the user
would think ALL is lost.

Personally Im dealing with a real pain in the butt one , it keeps hitting me with changes to
desktop.ini and the location is c:\Windows\Assemby\GAC_32
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That's interesting. Was this a Windows 7 machine, cause I hear nothing bad can ever happen to them?

In all seriousness I wouldn't listen to Symantec. Even if I were paranoid about infections I wouldn't get their security software. It'll run my computer to the ground by slowing everything down.

The safest way to compute is to use Linux. Hardly anyone uses Linux, so hardly anyone would write a virus to infect them.
 
Is there a virus thats been killing hard drives lately? Cause I just had about 5 out of 15 computers with dead hard drives in this week. :eek:
 
Steve said:
Quick, everyone panic and run out and buy Symantec's latest product! :p
Click to expand...
I know they've gotten better over the past while, but I'd still rather stab myself in the face with a spork than pay for or use any Symantec AV / Internet Security product.
 
If it's targeted, then chances are it's custom, and unless it's doing something obvious it's probably is trivial to make a virus that gets past heuristics. All you need is one knucklehead to get phished.
 
Targeted is not necessarily custom wrote for that person.

It uses information gleened from other sources to make more accurate and resourceful attempts at its target. Its amazing how many people just open attachments in e-mail still to this day. I have watched people do it, right in front of me when I say "Ok show me how you do this this this".

They go right to the inbox, grab a random email with attachment and open it, paying 0 attention to its source, and more attention to the paperclip icon that shows its an attachment.

I don't know if its a sign that we've failed to educate them well enough, or if they failed to listen. One thing is for sure, the darkest is still not here yet.

@Loco I've seen a few that hide in the MBR recently that give you all kinds of fucking headaches. They CAN be cleaned, and one I had was ironically cleaned by the TDSS rootkit tool that you can download from....drumroll please....Symantec. So shit on them as you wish, they saved 1 installation from a full format and reinstall, even a blind squirrel gets a nut eh?
 
I'll take Norton any day over Bit Defender or AVG. That being said antivirus is like cars, there's a new model every year so what's best can change.
 
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