Jeff Williams and Matt Braverman, of the Microsoft Anti-Malware Engineering Team, attended the Virus Bulleting conference in Montreal. Both were presenters and their papers are now avaialable for download at the Microsoft Download Center.
Jeff's paper, entitled "I Know What You Did Last Logon", was a look into monitoring software from the perspective of privacy and the boundaries of appropriate versus inappropriate use for such technology.
Matt's paper, entitled "Behavioral Modeling of Social Engineering-Based Malicious Software" focuses on malware that leverages social engineering to infect a computer.
Source: Anti-malware Engineering Team Blog
McAfee announced that its anti-spam researchers have been tracking a new trend nicknamed "spam island-hopping," in which island-hopping spammers use the domain names of small islands as Web site links in spam campaigns to disguise themselves from spam filters that traditionally catch more well-known domains. McAfee traced spam activity from the Isle of Man to the tiny tropical island of Tokelau in the South Pacific.
Traditionally, spammers have used well-known top level domains (TLDs) such as .com, .biz or .info. By using top level domains from small island countries, such as .im from the Isle of Man, spammers attempt to avoid detection by using domains previously unknown to spam filters. Using a lesser- known top level domain makes it harder to distinguish spam from legitimate e- mail by examining the links in the e-mails.
Read their press release and/or download the anti_spam.pdf.