Symantec agrees to buy part of Verisign

According to the New York Times, security firm Symantec is on the verge of closing a deal with VeriSign’s authentication services unit for $1.3 billion USD. The unit made up nearly have of VeriSign’s $1.03 billion sales revenue last year.

VeriSign wants to get out of the authentication business in order to focus on domains. It currently has a monopoly over the sale of .com and .net names. I guess it will make up for the profits lost in the sale by charging you and me more for domains.

Symantec: China is number-one source of malware

According to a recent study conducted by Symantec, more malware originates from China than any other country– 28.2%, in fact.

Close behind China is Romania, which is responsible for 21.1% of malware. Next was the United States at 13.8%. Symantec found that although the majority of malware appears to come from North American mail servers, the original source is usually abroad.

Interestingly, a great deal of malware now targets people in specific roles rather than the public at large. Individuals with titles such as “director, senior official, vice president, manager, and executive director” tend to be hit with more spam, as do workers in the public policy and defense industries.

Photo | clix

Symantec : Shortened URLs pose security risk

Nearly all of us have used URL-shortening services such as bit.ly or TinyURL. They are a great convenience, but according to Symantec , pose a security threat.

The computer security firm says their malicious use is on the rise, and that they are especially dangerous because users do not always know where the links point.

The good thing about many modern URL-shorteners is they will generally display a gateway page before redirecting to the user to show what site the link points to. Not all services offer this feature or require it to be used, however. The next time you encounter a shortened link, think twice before clicking.

Source | Radio New Zealand

Symantec Releases MessageLabs Intelligence Report

Computer security giant Symantec announced the release of its May 2009 MessageLabs Intelligence Report. Covering a wide variety of Internet threats, the report details some disturbing new trends.

Most notably, spam has increased by 5.1% since April. It now accounts for 90.4% of email. Where you live depends on what time of day you receive spam. American spam activity peaks between 9-10 AM, while Europeans get a steady spewing of unwanted email all day. Asians get their spam in the wee hours of the morning.

Interestingly, there’s been a trend for spammers not to write long emails, but just include a message title and link. If more spam is being sent out, at least no one is having War and Peace delivered to their inbox each day.
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