FORTINET ANNOUNCES NOVEMBER 2010 THREAT REPORT

KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 6 (Bernama) -- Network security provider, Fortinet, has
announced its November 2010 Threat Landscape report, highlighting a few key
vulnerabilities in Internet security.

According to the report, there had been a 12 per cent reduction in global
spam after Dutch authorities dismantled a large Bredolab network, by taking more
than 140 servers offline.

"Bredolab was often used to load spam engines, which are typically used to
sell fraudulent pharmaceuticals," Cyber Security and Threat Research Project
Manager, Derek Manky said in a statement Monday.

A botnet named Koobface, well known for spamming popular social media sites
was taken offline on Nov 14 as well, when UK Internet Service Provider (ISP)
took three MotherShip servers offline.

"When the primary servers were taken offline, the intermediary servers
failed to proxy content, which effectively crippled the botnet," he said.

However, communications was restored five days later which is likely due to
the botnet containing an File Tranfer Protocol (FTP) harvesting module.

"New and old vulnerabilities will continue to be exploited, so it's
important to keep all application patches up-to-date.

"With the use of communication through common protocols, application control
is becoming more important to identify malicious activity on the application
level," he said.

FortiGuard Labs compile threat statistics and trends for November based on
data collected from FortiGate network security appliances and intelligence
systems in production worldwide.

-- BERNAMA