No sexually explicit content in the office, please!
Symantec announced the publication of its September 2010 MessageLabs Intelligence Report, and the analysis reveals that 35 percent of remote and office-based workers who use the MessageLabs Hosted Web Security Service are more likely to trigger a web site block based on corporate policy infringement when on the road rather than in the office.
MessageLabs Intelligence investigated the most frequently blocked policy categories comparing office-bound and roaming workers and found that blocks for the Downloads category are 5.4 times more likely to be triggered by mobile workers. Likewise, Shopping, Search Engines and Personals & Dating categories are all more frequently blocked for workers outside the office than those who are inside while blocks on Adult/Sexually Explicit content was more likely to be attempted from the workplace.
Earlier this month, many email users around the world were caught off guard by an email with the subject line “Here You Have” in their inboxes. The “Here You Have” virus did not deploy new tactics but rather used social engineering techniques to spread through email and also spread by copying itself from networked drives to removable drives.
While the attack used older techniques, the social engineering aspect of using genuine email addresses sent to recipients with whom the sender may have done business or may know personally, added legitimacy and credibility to the attack.
Analysis of the most frequently blocked malware for the last month revealed that the Sality.AE virus was the most prevalent. Sality.AE spreads by infecting executable files and attempts to download potentially malicious files from the Internet.
Analysis of web security activity shows that 33.6 percent of malicious domains blocked were new in September, a decrease of 0.7 percentage points since August. Additionally, 21.8% of all web-based malware blocked was new in September; an increase of 8.9 percentage points since last month.
In September, the most spammed industry sector with a spam rate of 94.1 percent continued to be the Automotive sector, followed by the Education sector (92.9 percent), the Chemical & Pharmaceutical sector (92.4 percent) and IT Services (92.0 percent). Government/Public Sector remained the most targeted industry for malware with 1 in 35.8 emails being blocked as malicious.