Social Engineering again, someone praying on xmas spirit and good will to spread their filthy malware.
It quite often happens during festive times, someone hatches a new worm and sends it out packaged as a jolly xmas card or game.

A significant worm outbreak over the new year festivities has put paid to the notion we’ve seen [...]

0×00: Preface
Media, kindly supported by AV “experts”, drawn apocalyptical vison of desctruction caused by stupid M$ Outlook / VisualBasic worm, called “ILOVEYOU”. Absurdal estimations - $10M lost for “defending the disease”, especially when you take a look at increasing with the speed of light value of AV companies market shares, made many people sick. Lame [...]

This is the first part (of many others to come) consisting of basic a introduction to different viruses, some terminology and other aspects required before starting to understand or write viruses…
Definition
A virus is (taken from Windows XP’s Help And Support Center):

A program that attempts to spread from computer to computer and either cause damage [...]

It’s good to see work on open source tools in the countermeasure department aswell as the attack and penetration arena.
It’s a shame since Snort and Nessus have gone semi-commercial.

I hope more people invest their time in good IDS, Firewall and IPS systems, I love things like IPCop and hope to see more products like HLBR.
HLBR [...]

Malware herders are speeding up, the first wave is already here for MS06-40.
It’s basically a variant of some old malware suited to the new vulnerability. Same old story then, same packer, technique, new exploit.
Same as the days of autorooters.
It’s basically the Mocbot trojan that was used in the Zotob worm attack in August 2005.

The first [...]

Botnets are indeed a growing problem, we’ve seen serious cases of DDoS extortion, the most recent example would be the attacks against the ‘million dollar homepage’ and the problems it caused the owner.
Botnets have been used for quite some time as spam networks and mostly for script kiddies to have DoS wars on IRC networks, [...]

Botnets and organises cybercrime is getting more prevalent, it seems it’s increasing exponentially despire crackdowns by the US governments and other organisations.
The criminals are getting more advanced, phishing scams are getting more realistic, technically trojans are getting more effective and the groups are getting really organised.

Cybercrooks are organizing better and moving to more sophisticated tactics [...]