Symantec warns of a Sality.AE virus threat

According to Symantec's September 2010 MessageLabs Intelligence Report, the Sality.AE virus was the most prevalent blocked piece of malware this month.

It said that Sality.AE spreads by infecting executable files and attempts to download potentially malicious files from the internet, and in terms of endpoint threats, it was the most prevalent.

Also, a third of employees are more likely to trigger a website block based on corporate policy infringement when on the road, rather than in the office. The report found that web-based malware accounted for one in 1,807 of the website traffic blocks triggered for remote workers, compared with one in 322 for office-based workers.

Of the blocked sites, shopping, search engines and dating categories were frequently blocked for workers outside the office compared to those who are inside, while blocks on adult or sexually explicit content was more likely to be attempted from the workplace.

Paul Wood, senior analyst at Symanted Hosted Services, said: “In general, more policy blocks overall are triggered by workers when they are out of the office, indicating rather intuitively that users are more compliant with usage policies when in the office.

“More than one-third of workers that are both remote and desk-based trigger a greater number of policy blocks when they are out of the office, perhaps taking the opportunity to visit a greater variety of websites than they would when at their desks.”

See original article on scmagazineus.com