This month, Symantec is celebrating Earth Day by exploring our commitment to environmental responsibility. We've explored Symantec's commitment to LEED certification previously, and today we hear from Debra McLaughlin, Symantec's stakeholder engagement program manager, on Symantec's Earth Hour participation.

“Demand on natural resources has doubled since 1966 and we currently use the equivalent of 1.5 planets to support our activities.” WWF 2012 Living Planet Report  

Every year, hundreds of millions of people, in over 7,000 cities and towns across 152 countries and territories, turn off their lights for one hour in honor of Earth Hour, the single largest symbolic mass participation event in the world. Earth Hour, created by the World Wildlife Federation (WWF), brings awareness to the issue of climate change and the need to protect precious environmental resources.

Symantec Green Teams and employees across our global community participate in Earth Hour each year. This year, we had formal participation from eight of Symantec’s Green Teams, including: 

• Culver City, CA, United States
• Mountain View, CA, United States
• Roseville, MN, United States
• San Francisco, CA, United States
• Reading, United Kingdom
• Dublin, Ireland
• Auckland, New Zealand
• Wellington, New Zealand

Check out The Earth Hour You Tube channel to see videos from Earth Hour events across the world.

Spotlight on Dublin

On Saturday, March 23rd at 8:30 pm, the Dublin Green Team showed their support and turned off all non-essential lights and appliances for one hour. Employees were encouraged to participate at home and to get creative by taking a photo during this hour, or alternatively an environmental related photo.  All entries to the Earth Hour Photo Competition were displayed on our Environmental Notice Board in the Café.  The winning photo (chosen by employees) was announced on Friday, April 5th, and the winning photographer received an eco-friendly prize.

Turning out the lights is just the beginning

As Earth Hour states, ‘turning the lights out is just the beginning’ and there are many ways we all can continue to save resources and protect our planet every day. At Symantec, employees can join one of our 24 local Green Teams to take part in initiatives that help us as a company to achieve our environmental goals, and allow employees to show their personal passion for the environmental causes they care most about.

First established in 2008, Symantec’s Green Teams give employees a platform that they can work from to affect environmental changes within our company. Through the Green Teams, groups of employees passionate about the environment are working together to educate fellow employees about personal behavior changes, and to identify opportunities for the Facilities and IT teams to implement changes in Symantec's buildings, data centers, and business practices that save energy, water and reduce waste. Each team develops its own initiatives based on the particular environmental needs of its site, region, and country, but with support from other teams. To date, we have 24 Green Teams established around the globe.

 We thank all of the Green Teams and employees in our Symantec community who turned off the lights this year to show their support for our planet. Any employees interested in joining an existing Green Team or starting their own can contact me. 

And remember to mark your calendars for Earth Hour 2014, Saturday, March 29th at 8:30 pm!

Debra McLaughlin is Symantec's Stakeholder Engagement Program Manager.

Most successful cyber attacks and exploits can be traced back to poor application security. Applications and the data they use are among the weakest cyber security links for enterprises. Today, applications and data reside inside and outside enterprise data centers and are deployed on many platforms and devices, including mobile devices.

Join me today at 2:30 pm in room 116 as HP and Symantec senior technologists share insights and steps you can take to understand and address these risks and costs in your enterprise.

Day 3 at Symantec Vision begins and ends in the Grand Garden Arena--with another great keynote in the morning and a sidesplitting performance and party at night. And of course, you can also look forward to another productive day of sessions, labs, and activities in between.

Keynote Preview
Yesterday's keynote focused on how Symantec can help you keep your business safe, compliant, and available. Today, we dive deeper into these important topics with provocative and freewheeling roundtable discussions featuring thought leaders from HP, Fujitsu, Intel VMware, Symantec customers, and experts--and moderated by veteran industry analyst James Staten from Forrester Research. You'll even have an opportunity to chime in on the discussion using a real-time live response audience polling system.

Start Your Evening Off Right at the Pre-Party Reception
Before you head over to the big Vision Conference Party in the Grand Garden Arena, stop by the Expo Hall for gourmet food, drinks, and fun. Take time to tweet or text photos with your favorite slapstick celebrity look-a-likes, sample the selection of fine beer and wine, try a "comedy cocktail," and prepare for the non-stop laughter and music to come in the feature presentation. The fun starts in the Marquee Ballroom at 6:00 pm.

Get Laughing and then Get Loud at the Big Conference Party, co-sponsored by HP
They say laughter is the best medicine. But we contend that laughter followed immediately by pounding random objects with drumsticks is even better. So after the pre-party reception, head over to the Grand Garden Arena for an exclusive live performance by Jim Gaffigan, star of a recent one-hour Comedy Central Special and one of the most popular and in-demand comedians in the United States. After you recover from the laughter, you'll get a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to grab a pair of drumsticks and play along with Recycled Percussion, an innovative percussion group that was discovered on NBC's America's Got Talent, and is now one of the hottest shows in Las Vegas. Finally, don't forget your conference badge. It's your ticket into the party, and you will NOT be granted access to the Grand Garden Arena without it.

Symantec Vision 2013 Las Vegas is finally here! After months of preparation and company -wide collaboration, we are very excited as a company to see it come to life. After diligently reviewing the survey results from Vision Las Vegas last year, we have focused our efforts on making Vision 2013 the best Vision yet.

This year we have turned the expo hall into the hub of the conference. This allows our attendees to have a better opportunity to network with each other by bringing them all together, and also gives our valued sponsors increased exposure and more time to connect with attendees and Symantec employees. A list of things we have included in the expo hall this year is below:

• Self-paced labs and certification study lab
• Cyber Readiness Challenge Headquarters
• Sponsor booths
• Symantec Solution Center
• Internet Lounge
• Lunch and evening meals
• Host space to all evening receptions

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, that’s why this year we moved breakfast out of the expo hall each day and closer to the Grand Garden Arena where the morning keynotes take place. This avoids any unnecessary back and forth from the expo hall and the Keynote. This went over really well this morning as attendees could leisurely enjoy their breakfast before the keynote.

Steve Bennett kicked off our morning keynote by giving our customers and partners a look into the new Symantec  4.0. The remainder of the keynote featured Symantec Executives that focused on how Symantec can help you keep your business safe, compliant, and available.

This afternoon the conference center at the MGM is buzzing as attendees go from session to session and cruise around the Expo Hall. Tonight attendees have the F.I.R.S.T Robotics Reception and the User Group Challenge to look forward to after an amazing second day at Vision Las Vegas. In addition, the Cyber Readiness Challenge begins tonight in the expo hall. This will be an excellent display of skill and threat, giving participants a better idea of what they are up against in the cyber world. Stay tuned for details about these events and updates on everything else Vision!

The Connect team is having a busy week at Vision conference. We're sponsoring the charging stations and have had lots of great opportunities to meet our community members and introduce customers to Connect. We also had a great design session with our Trusted Advisors, who are a group of dedicated customers and partners. Here's TA Tony Sterling, working the lock at the charging station.

If you're attending the conference, please stop by one of the two charging stations, and introduce yourself - we usually recognize Connect user IDs - everyone knows ohzone, but come meet the person behind the avatar!

As part of Symantec’s strategy to produce more environmentally responsible events, this year the Symantec event team worked with the MGM Grand and other suppliers to reduce our waste footprint. Key initial successes include:

• 45% of all waste will be recycled by the MGM Grand
• 100% of organic food waste will be composted, and over 60% of Expo waste will be diverted from landfill
• Over 60% of the materials used to build and brand The Expo are made from more sustainable materials (carpet, booths, signage)
• Zero waste created from the production of the keynote
• All plates and cups are reusable or compostable
• Paper usage eliminated from labs, training workshops and event surveys.

Our first effort to reduce our carbon footprint was at Symantec Vision EMEA in Barcelona (See our first Vision Barcelona Sustainability Report here).  Vision 2013 Las Vegas is the second step in a major global sustainable events strategy. Areas identified for improvement in future years include, the continual selection of eco-certified hotels and venues, the focus on more sustainable and healthier food options, and the use of more sustainable print, expo and mechanising solutions.

While Symantec is pleased with the progress made, we are at the first step towards greater sustainability and leadership across a range of corporate events.  We hope to create an even stronger partnership between the events, corporate responsibility teams and our partners. In the future, will be working closely with our suppliers to implement a more sustainable and innovative conference that will improve the impact and value of Vision on the attendees, the community, the planet and ultimately the Symantec Brand.

This article is taken from symantec special hidden document 

http://eval.symantec.com/mktginfo/enterprise/white_papers/b-nbu_7_opscenter_analytics_WP.en-us.pdf

Ops Center (Free Product)

OpsCenter is a free product which gives you the ability to monitor, alert and do operational reporting on NetBackup, Enterprise Vault, Backup Exec and PureDisk. OpsCenter server is part of NetBackup and can be deployed on master server for managing a single domain, or independently for managing multiple NetBackup Domains. It also allows you to do minor management tasks such as “upping” tape drives, restarting failed jobs, freezing/unfreezing and other tape functions, restarting services/daemons on Masters etc. The free version limits historical reporting.

OpsCenter Analytics (Licensed Option)

OpsCenter Analytics is a licensed option that is unlocked with a key. This gives the customer the ability to display customizable, multi-level views of backup and archive resources and customizable reports for tracking service usage and expenditures. It also contains tools for defining cost metrics and chargeback formulas or handling alerts as well as allowing reporting beyond 60 days.

For information on licensing, platform support and deployment considerations for this feature please contact your Symantec account team or Symantec reseller.

I’m optimistic on the current trends in security. The concepts of “intelligence” and “big data” have to potential to shift focus to counter the current threat landscape of intentional attacks to steal or destroy valuable information. Additional focus on the detection of attacks within perimeter of your network will really help with reducing risks.  

But I believe we need to be careful on how we approach “intelligence” as a practical component of information security programs. Intrusion detection and event management are aspects of intelligence that the industry has been using for many years but not many organizations use them effectively. Most orgs stand up a solution to check the box in a policy or regulation and never really integrate it into their operations.

My favorite new term is “actionable.” My first question when I hear about a new solution in information security is going to be “is the output actionable?” In this context I define actionable as some task performed that demonstrably reduces risk in the environment. Actionable Intelligence goes beyond the pretty dashboards to informing changes in the organization whether they are technical or procedural.

Compiling information is great. Analysis is great too. But if you can’t get those volumes down to a reasonable set of recommended actions, then it’s only so much navel gazing. I want to improve security, not just measure it. I already know how bad security is. I want to make it better.

Contributor: Avdhoot Patil

Phishers have already shown interest in the violence that erupted recently in various parts of the Arab world. The phishing attack involving Syria is a good example. Phishers are now taking advantage of the political unrest in Egypt as protests in the country continue. In March 2013, phishers promoted former Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik in a phishing site. The phishing site was hosted on servers based in North Carolina, USA. The name “Ahmed Shafik” was used in the domain name of the phishing site.

Figure 1. Phishing site designed as a fake official website of Ahmed Shafik

The phishing site was designed to look like an official page of the politician. It contained a message in Arabic prompting users to choose from two brands in order to get news and updates of Ahmed Shafik. The brands belonged to social networking and information service sectors respectively. When the logo of either of these two brands is clicked, users are redirected to the phishing sites that pose as the login pages of the respective brands. The contents of the phishing pages were altered to promote the former Prime Minister. If users fell victim to the phishing site by entering their sensitive information, phishers would have successfully stolen their confidential information.

Users are advised to follow best practices to avoid phishing attacks:

• Do not click on suspicious links in email messages
• Do not provide any personal information when answering an email
• Do not enter personal information in a pop-up page or screen
• Ensure the website is encrypted with an SSL certificate by looking for the padlock, ‘https’, or the green address bar when entering personal or financial information
• Update your security software (such as Norton Internet Security, which protects you from online phishing) frequently

It's not quite time to say goodbye yet. We've saved some of the best for last as we close Vision 2013 with a final day of breakouts and labs, an inspiring closing keynote, and our final “Ultimate Fan” prize drawing.

Closing Keynote Preview
To send you back home on a high note, our closing keynote on Thursday afternoon will feature Peter Diamandis, the chairman and CEO of the renowned X PRIZE Foundation and a pioneer in the field of commercial space travel. Don't leave Las Vegas without hearing Peter talk about his remarkable, inspiring work to open the space frontier for humanity and drive radical technological breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.

Are You the Ultimate Fan?
Immediately following Dr. Diamandis, we'll hold our final Vision Grand Prize drawing for a trip to your choice of thousands of sporting or entertainment events throughout the country. Make sure you have enough Ultimate Fan points to qualify--and then stick around for the drawing, since you must be present to win.

Schedule Some Last Minute One-on-One Time
Take advantage of your final day at Vision to schedule a few more expert one-to-one meetings and live discussions with Symantec experts.

Please Tell Us What You Think
It's our goal to make every Vision conference better than the last, and we need your honest feedback to do that. So please take a few minutes to complete our conference survey, so we know what you liked and what we need to improve for next year. You can take the survey from your Vision Mobile App, on your own laptop, or from the kiosks located outside the Grand Garden Arena. To show our gratitude, we'll give you a portable power outlet (a $12 value) just for completing the survey. You can stop by the Conference Services Desk to pick up your gift any time before 4:00 pm today. In addition, make sure you stop by the Customer First Booth near registration to give us a video testimonial of your Symantec experiences and qualify to win a Wii U!

Help Us Make a Difference
Symantec is committed to respecting the local community and protecting the planet, and we invite you to join our efforts! As you leave the conference, please donate any unwanted conference materials--including used paper, notebooks, pens, badge holders, and backpacks--to the Teacher EXCHANGE organization. All of your donated materials will be repurposed and put to good use in local schools. You'll find donation bins located near the Conference Services Desk.

Tunisia Telecom boasts more than six million subscribers in the fixed line and mobile services industry. In order to move into a new stage of growth, the company needed to consolidate its entire information infrastructure from data protection to storage management. Symantec and EMC had jointly provided services up until that time, but only one solution was needed. After evaluating each, Symantec was selected as the sole provider. The integrated solution is centralizing and streamlining data protection, reducing storage volumes, and automating the failover and high availability of Tunisia Telecom’s core billing application. With Symantec’s help, Tunisia Telecom is ready for the next stage in its growth. To read more about how Tunisia Telecom is using Symantec solutions, follow this link: http://bit.ly/11G7UQi   

The Tuesday night expo hall reception featured the F.I.R.S.T. Robotics Team comprised of local youth who have an affinity for technology. The mission of the program is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership.

The team reached the Semi-Finals with the robot they built that launches Frisbees. The kids showcased their robot on the expo floor and even let some of the attendees drive the robot which was a huge success with Vision’s functional IT crowd. In addition to showing off their robot, the kids spent the evening telling attendees about F.I.R.S.T. Robotics, and many attendees were excited to go home and tell their own children about the program.

Stephen Gillett and his family were in attendance, and presented the F.I.R.S.T. Robotics Team with a check from Symantec for $5,000.00. To add to the excitement, SymMan made a surprise visit and greeted all the kids in the Expo Hall. The kids loved SymMan, and my favorite quote from one of them was, “Cool! Look at his jet pack!” However, I think the adult attendees may have enjoyed SymMan even more than the kids. SymMan spent about an hour patrolling the Expo Hall and taking pictures with the attendees. SymMan’s presence made a huge impact on the reception, as he assured everyone that he was protecting the world’s people and information, one day at a time.

Check out the recording of our super session at Vision. Jeff Hausman discusses the importance of business continuity and how to keep your business up and running.

Symantec Vision gave us a lot to think about, and we were fortunate to hear from Symantec leadership, who shared important insights about the current state of information security and the direction of the company moving forward. First, Symantec’s CEO Steve Bennett shared his experience over the past several months as the company has worked to redefine its focus on solving our customers’ problems and achieving organic growth. He reiterated that we are committed to intelligent, manageable changes that will revitalize Symantec, the partner community and the world of information protection.

We also heard from Francis deSouza, president of product and services at Symantec who delved into today’s three overarching IT challenges:

The Information Explosion
First, we are dealing with a tremendous explosion in the information we are creating and storing. Companies we recently surveyed expect their information to grow between 60 and 70 percent within the next 12 months, far more than we’ve seen in the past. He noted the example of a data center in Manhattan that was affected by Hurricane Sandy last fall. They had a tremendous amount of information they had to sort through, knowing they could only save a portion. They knew that only about 20 percent of the information was necessary, but they didn’t know how to find the portion that was critical for them.

The Evolving Threat Landscape
Next, Francis mentioned the quickly evolving threat landscape businesses face today. Cybercriminals are shifting their attacks to more vulnerable targets. That means attacking smaller businesses with fewer defenses, and using the information gained through those attacks to get their foot in the door of large businesses. The same tactic is holding true with the people being attacked, as well. It’s no longer necessary to only target executives. Other people in the company have plenty of information publicly available on the Internet, and the attackers are able to use that to craft sophisticated threats designed to compromise companies’ sensitive information. They are also carrying out diversionary attacks designed to focus IT resources in one area while stealing information from another part of the network.

Growing Data Center Complexity

The backdrop for these concerns is a data center environment that is in a constant state of flux. On the endpoint side, we’re dealing with an increasing number of mobile devices that need to be supported in addition to traditional desktops and laptops, with a variety of configurations and operating systems. They are taking more of IT’s attention, increasing the challenge of protecting information.

Symantec’s Goals

To combat these challenges, we have three goals here at Symantec. First, we want to help maintain user productivity. Second, that productivity has to coexist with security. And third, organizations need to effectively manage that information and keep it available to users.

To that end, we are organizing Symantec’s product portfolio around three central themes:

• We want to help companies be intelligent with the resources they have. This involves an awareness of outside factors such as the threat landscape. They also need the ability to effectively control factors within the organization, knowing what and where their most important information is. We also want to help them understand user behavior, to determine risks and improve productivity.
• Second, we are committed to driving efficiency. Given the increase in information, this means simplifying wherever possible, eliminating duplicate and unnecessary information.
• Cross everything. We want our customers to be able to use whatever hardware they want while maximizing whatever technology platforms they need.

To make this happen, we are continuing to invest in our current offerings, making them as effective and simple as possible. Meanwhile, we are working on solving larger problems for our customers, developing new solutions to address changing needs. And an important part of this is partnering with other industry professionals to deliver the right solutions to customers.

For customers, the result will be a stronger information fabric in the data center, helping them understand what information they have that is truly critical for their business to function, eliminating redundancy. In addition, we are simplifying security by addressing the challenge of managing all the different solutions companies are investing in today. Our security as a service leverages our expertise by monitoring both Symantec and third-party security products in the environment, which we anticipate to be the best security model moving forward.

It has been an exciting week. For more detail we invite you to watch the keynote speeches in their entirety here.

All the colors together make black – yes
All the colors together make white – yes

How can they both be true?

First we need to understand what color is.
We see a color when light of a specific range of wavelengths hits the cone receptors in the back of our eyes. We have only 3 different cone receptors: those that receive red, blue and green wavelengths. All the other colors we “see” are our brain’s interpretation of the varying wavelengths in between the 3 primary colors. For example: what we see as yellow is both the green and red cones being activated, cyan is when both green and blue cones are triggered, and magenta is when the red and blue cones are simultaneously affected.

So what is happening when we see white?
Simple, when all three of the cone types are activated at the same time, we see white. Inversely, black is when nothing activates any of the cones.

But why is it when we take all the paint colors and mix them together, we see black? 
That gets us to the next thing we need to understand about light. Light waves are constantly hitting then bouncing off of surfaces, where some are absorbed into the surface itself. The color of different surfaces is determined by which wavelengths are reflected and which are absorbed. The darker a surface is, the more light is being absorbed into it. Basically, pigments create a variety of permeable surfaces, soaking up the light, so that by the time several pigment colors are added together, very little light can escape, thus we have black.  

Now in the modern world of design, we rarely deal with pigment-based color. Our devices directly generate the light we work with, making for much purer and vibrant colors. This also holds true for colored light projected onto a white screen, because although it is reflected light, there is still nothing actually absorbing the light. When we see black on the monitor or screen, it is not absorbed light, it is a complete absence of light waves. Inversely, white is when all the wavelengths are projected simultaneously activating all of our eyes color receptors.

So, although all the colors together make black, they ONLY do so when the absorptive properties of the surface that the light is reflecting off of increase.

The rest of the time, all the colors together make white.

Recently a few of my colleagues and I had the opportunity to participate in the National Cybersecurity Excellence Partnership (NCEP) partner signing ceremony for the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE).

Established in 2012 through a partnership between NIST, the State of Maryland and Montgomery County, the NCCoE is dedicated to furthering innovation through the rapid identification, integration and adoption of practical cybersecurity solutions. The approach taken by the NCCoE is to integrate commercially available technologies to build practical cybersecurity solutions that can be rapidly applied to the challenges that businesses face each day. 

The NCEP partner signing ceremony was held at the NCCoE in Rockville, MD and included speeches from:

• NIST Director Patrick Gallagher
• U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski
• Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley
• Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett
• National Security Agency Director General Keith Alexander

We are excited to be a part of the NCCoE and assisting with finding solutions to some of our country’s complex cyber challenges. Along with the other 10 inaugural partners, Symantec’s solutions and technologies will be embedded within the Center of Excellence and will provide an opportunity for our people to work alongside both government personnel and industry colleagues.  

Since the NCCoE’s launch in early 2012 there has been much talk about the importance of cybersecurity, including the release of President Obama’s Executive Order on Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity. NIST has been tasked with leading the development of a framework of best practices and standards to reduce the cyber risk to critical infrastructure. For its part, the NCCoE will provide the opportunity to leverage the best practices and standards that are developed by NIST in coordination with other agencies and the private sector and test those approaches in the NCCoE lab environment.

With so much focus on cybersecurity, this is an exciting time to work in the industry and here at Symantec we are excited to be a part of the NCEP and look forward to what the future holds.

To learn more about the NCCoE you can visit their website: http://csrc.nist.gov/nccoe/The-Center/The-Center.html.

寄稿: Avdhoot Patil

アラブ諸国の各地で最近勃発している紛争は、しばらく前からフィッシング詐欺師の関心を引いています。シリア騒乱を悪用したフィッシング詐欺もその一例ですが、今度は、反政府運動が続くエジプトの政情不安が利用されています。2013 年 3 月には、フィッシングサイトでエジプトのアフマド・シャフィーク元首相が利用されました。フィッシングサイトのホストサーバーは米国ノースカロライナ州に置かれ、ドメイン名には「Ahmed Shafik」の名が使われていました。

図 1.アフマド・シャフィーク元首相の公式サイトに偽装したフィッシングサイト

このフィッシングサイトは、一見すると元首相の公式ページのような作りです。アラビア語で書かれたメッセージは、アフマド・シャフィーク元首相に関する最新ニュースを購読するために、2 つのブランドのいずれかを選択するよう促しています。ここで利用されているのは、あるソーシャルネットワークサービスと情報サービスで、どちらかのロゴをクリックすると、ユーザーはそれぞれのログインページに偽装したフィッシングサイトにリダイレクトされます。フィッシングページのコンテンツは、元首相を応援する内容に改変されています。このフィッシングサイトに騙されたユーザーは、個人情報を盗まれてしまいます。

フィッシング攻撃を防ぐためにできる限りの対策を講じることを推奨します。

• 電子メールメッセージの中の疑わしいリンクはクリックしない。
• 電子メールに返信するときに個人情報を記述しない。
• ポップアップページやポップアップ画面に個人情報を入力しない。
• 個人情報や口座情報を入力する際には、鍵マーク、「https」の文字、緑色のアドレスバーなどが使われていることを確かめ、その Web サイトが SSL で暗号化されていることを確認する。
• ノートン インターネットセキュリティなど、オンラインフィッシングを防止するセキュリティソフトウェアを頻繁に更新する。

* 日本語版セキュリティレスポンスブログの RSS フィードを購読するには、http://www.symantec.com/connect/ja/item-feeds/blog/2261/feed/all/jaにアクセスしてください。

We have blogged before about mobile spam messages, and while email spam declined in the past year to around 66%, mobile spam—although not yet that prevalent—is now gaining ground.

Currently the “winning ticket” theme is making its rounds through central Europe. Eight friends of mine received it over the space of a few days and I am proud that none of them fell for it, even though some were sorely tempted. The message states that you have won two million pounds sterling with some numbers that you never selected, in a non-specified lottery that you have certainly never played. There are a lot of variations of this particular scam that we have observed over the years, with a range of different prizes including cars and holidays. Unfortunately, there is no money behind it—at least not for you—as of course if you never play the lottery, you will definitely never win it. It is just another advance fee scam, where the scammer will eventually try to trick the victim into paying some release fee or expenses in order to get the alleged prize.

The question that comes to mind is: how did the attackers get your phone number? There are various possibilities. From rogue mobile applications that steal your address book and upload it somewhere to entities that sell such information; or data leakage after data breaches at a service that you have subscribed to. In some cases, it even seems that the scammer is simply iterating through all possible numbers in a given mobile network and trying out these numbers. As most providers have a very good saturation of their number space, the chances of hitting a live number is actually quite high. Therefore receiving the message is not necessarily your fault, it could be that one of your friend’s mobile phones was infected and then uploaded your number, or it could be that the scammer just picked your number by pure luck.

Unfortunately, this “luck” still does not mean that you have won anything.

As always, do not respond to such spam messages and definitely don’t quit your day job for it.

User Facing: Desktop

• Improved the code that imports Accreditation and Certification levels achieved by Connect users. Also refreshed the database to reflect the latest Accreditation and Certification info on Connect user profile pages.
• Changed who can mark forum posts as solved (and who can clear a previous solution).
  • Users who can mark and/or clear a solution:
    -- The author of the problem post.
    -- Community Managers
  • Users who can mark a solution but cannot clear a solution:
    -- Trusted Advisors
    -- Technical Supporters
• Added the ability for some privileged users to unpublish (but not delete) unsuitable or inappropriate content.
• Added code that makes it more obvious to a user who is marking a solution that if they change their mind, they must clear a previous solution before they are able to mark a new solution.
• Fixed an issue with IE users who were unable to see the Badgeville badges on user profile pages.
• Fixed an issue with incorrect/incomplete image paths in some of our RSS feeds.
• Tuned the new announcement block so it doesn't display inadvertently to users of the Internet Explorer browser.

Admin Facing

• Added a global, "administer any group" permission that will allow users with that permission to add or remove members from any group on Connect.
• Improved the user merge script to migrate the "member for" date from the source user profile to the target profile.
• Added the ability for group owners to customize the "membership request accepted" and "membership request denied" email messages that go out to prospective group members.

Join Symantec SMB security experts on Twitter (using the #SMBchat hashtag) on Thursday, April 25, at 9 a.m. PT / 12 p.m. ET to chat about the key trends highlighted in Symantec’s recently released Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), Volume 18.

The ISTR, which covers the major threat trends observed by Symantec in 2012, reveals that cybercriminals view SMBs as a prime target for stealing information. In fact, the largest growth area for targeted attacks in 2012 was businesses with fewer than 250 employees; 31 percent of all attacks targeted them, representing a threefold increase from 2011.

Getting a clear understanding of the dangers is an important step in improving security, and this year’s report is a wake-up call that SMBs are now being specifically targeted by cybercriminals.

Mark your calendars to join #SMBchat and learn how to protect your small business from attackers.

Topic: ISTR 18: SMB Wake-up Call – you’re a prime target for cybercriminals

Date: Thursday, April 25, 2013

Time: Starts at 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET

Length: 1 hour

Where: On Twitter.com; follow the hashtag #SMBchat

Expertparticipants:

• Kevin Haley, Director, Symantec Security Response, Symantec – @kphaley
• Jay Epton, Director SMB Sales for the EMEA Northern Region, Symantec – @Jay_Epton
• Anita Campbell, Small Business Trends – @Smallbiztrends