Remember the past press (and panic) about Conficker? If you didn’t see all of the headlines this spring (although it was especially hard to miss in April – the time of its supposed activation date), Conficker, also known as Downup, Downadup and Kido, is a worm that originally surfaced in the end of 2008, when it began exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows. Infected machines become part of a botnet which, theoretically, can be used for anything from propagating spam to denial of service attacks to pushing rogue anti-malware applications.

We’ve already seen a high amount of bad online behavior taking advantage of the H1N1, or swine flu, outbreak in the past few months. Early this spring, cyber scammers were quick to capitalize on swine flu fears to infect computers, steal personal information, and make profits. After all, from the cyber criminals' perspective, the topic has all the right characteristics needed to pull off an online scam: a global nature, a hot media-hyped issue, and high levels of curiosity and concern by the general public.

Today, November 30, is known as Cyber Monday and it marks the kickoff of the online shopping season. If you’re a savvy shopper, scouring the Web to find the best deals and bargains today, make sure to keep this in mind: Cyber Monday will also bring with it an upswing in cyber scams. In fact, our security analysts at the Malware Labs at Lavasoft have already reported a 390 percent increase in the amount of malware detected and added to Ad-Aware's threat database, compared to the same period last year.

This past week, news broke that British police have made groundbreaking headway in combating cyber crime, making the first arrests in Europe of two people suspected of distributing Zeus – a sophisticated Trojan designed to steal sensitive data. On November 3, the Metropolitan Police’s Central e-Crime Unit arrested a man and a woman in Manchester, England on suspicion of helping spread the Trojan, known as Zeus or Zbot.

It’s a disturbing occurrence that you don’t automatically think of in terms of the repercussions of a malware infestation…And according to this recent Associated Press article, it’s happening more often than you might imagine – innocent computer users unwittingly have pornographic images deposited on their PCs due to a virus, branding them as child abusers.