Microsoft has issued security advisories for the Outlook Web Access Privilege Elevation Vulnerability and ASP.NET, which could allow information disclosure.

Adobe has issued two zero-day security advisories for Adobe Reader/Acrobat and its Flash player.

Botnets Still Hot on the Malware Scene

On September 14, FortiGuard Labs detected a surge in Sasfis activity that was linked to the Asprox spambot. While Asprox has been around for some time, it has been silent for more than a year. The Asprox module that was dissected was intended to be used for an email seeding campaign. The emails contained zipped executable attachments, disguised as fax copies. The attachment was a copy of Sasfis, which would download Asprox in order to send more spam on the freshly infected machine.

In addition to an increase in Sasfis activity, the FortiGuard Center downloaded a sniffer module that scans traffic on TCP ports 21, 25 and 110 (FTP, SMTP and POP3).

“Traffic on these ports would be processed by the module into encrypted data sets and sent via HTTP POST to a command and control server located in Europe,” Manky continued. “Stolen FTP credentials can be quite valuable and are often used to hijack Web servers. The variant was also observed downloading the TotalSecurity ransomware suite, which has been high on our malware radar for a number of weeks.”

FortiGuard Labs compiled threat statistics and trends for September based on data collected from FortiGate' network security appliances and intelligence systems in production worldwide. Customers who use Fortinet’s FortiGuard Subscription Services should already be protected against the threats outlined in this report.

To read the full September Threat Landscape report which includes the top threat rankings in each category, please visit: http://www.fortiguard.com/report/roundup_september_2010.html. To view the monthly Security Minute videocast visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjwO6SjXYDo.

For ongoing threat research, bookmark the FortiGuard Center or add it to your RSS feed. Additional discussion on security technologies and threat analysis can be found at the Fortinet Security Blog at http://blog.fortinet.com. To learn more about FortiGuard Subscription Services, visit http://www.fortinet.com/products/fortiguard.html.