It’s one of those bad-news, good-news situations for Microsoft’s coming operating system, Windows Vista.

In a paper released this week by Symantec (the owner of SecurityFocus), two researchers analyzed the new networking stack in Windows Vista and found several classes of vulnerabilities. Overall, the researchers concluded that the move to a new code base for Vista’s networking stack will likely mean that, in the short term, the software could be less stable than the Windows XP stack. (more…)

It’s common knowledge that the last three years brought a huge number of critical vulnerabilities in Windows. Terms such as RPC DCOM, LSASS, WINS and PnP not only became topics of discussion for system administrators and programmers, but also caused headaches for virus analysts and real problems for rank and file users. Serious loopholes in Windows applications gave virus writers access to tens or hundreds of millions of computers around the world. And they didn’t hesitate to take advantage. These vulnerabilities effectively gave birth to such historic worms as Lovesan, Sasser and Mytob, not to mention hundreds of others which, although less well known to the general public, were actually no less of a threat. (more…)

Trend Micro has received numerous samples of this Trojan being in the wild.

It arrives as a dropped or downloaded file of another malware. It may also arrive as an attachment to a spammed email message. When executed, it exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft Word wherein a specially-crafted document can cause the application to drop and execute an embedded .EXE file. (more…)

Police in Finland and the UK this morning arrested three alleged members of a group dubbed “MOOP” suspected of delivering trojans via spam emails to gain access to confidential information stored on “thousands” of corporate machines, the Metropolitan Police’s Computer Crime Unit has confirmed.

The three men, a 63-year-old from England, a 19-year-old from Finland and a 28-year-old from Scotland, are being questioned after computers were “seized at residential addresses in both countries in addition to the suspects’ servers”. (more…)