Two flaw hunters, Kevin Finisterre and the pseudonymous LMH, say that each day in January, they will feature a security hole in Apple Computer's Mac OS X or applications for that operating system. Like previous efforts, which concerned Web browser and kernel flaws, the "Month of Apple Bugs" is meant to improve security, the two state on their Web site. Flaws that are publicly disclosed will get fixed quickly, they argue.

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in various Sophos Anti-Virus products, which could be exploited by attackers or malware to take complete control of an affected computer or cause a denial of service.

CA has declared that it is providing virus and spyware protection for corporate customers and consumers using the new Microsoft Windows Vista operating system.

CA Threat Manager, CA Anti-Virus and CA Anti-Spyware for Windows Vista have been in beta testing release since June. They are also being used by Microsoft in its own enterprise environment to help safeguard Windows Vista resources.

As malware is more and more written with a specific goal in mind, antivirus firms are deploying more intelligent recognition tools and creating unique signatures for individual clients.

IBM declared it has joined with BitDefender to include that company's antivirus and antispyware technologies into its Internet Security Systems division's endpoint security products.

McAfee's Avert Labs has exposed a new virus in the wild, W32/Realor.worm that modifies all of the Real Media files it comes across.

Geok Meng Ong talked about quite a few worms targeting media players on the most recent post to McAfee's Avert Labs blog. One was prominent for its behavior - W32/Realor.worm, a virus that brings delivers web pages to a Real Player user.

This week's report presents a series of Microsoft vulnerabilities, MS06-066, MS06-067, MS06-068, MS06-069, MS06-070, and MS06-071, the TelnetOn.A worm and the Briz.S Trojan.

Bulletins MS06-067 to MS06-071 refer to a number of critical vulnerabilities, including a cumulative update for Internet Explorer (MS06-067), a flaw in Flash Player (MS06-069) and another in XML Core Services (MS06-071). The MS06-066 bulletin is classified as "important" and is about problems in the client service for NetWare.

During a telephone discussion with reporters yesterday, outgoing Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin, while publicize the new security features of Windows Vista, which was released to manufacturing yesterday, told a reporter that the system's new lockdown features are so capable and thorough that he was comfortable with his own seven-year-old son using Vista without antivirus software installed.

Thompson Cyber Security Labs published a study according to which, amongst current desktop security software, Symantec's Norton AntiVirus 2007 suite is the best at detecting and removing stealth rootkits.

In the study, which was commissioned by Symantec and conducted by veteran anti-virus expert Roger Thompson, 20 arbitrarily selected pieces of rootkit-laden malware files were used against the major anti-virus and anti-spyware vendors to scale detection and elimination capabilities.

Symantec Corp. has publicized the availability of its Mobile AntiVirus 4.0 for Windows Mobile, a software that automatically protects mobile devices from security threats received via e-mail and multimedia messaging service (MMS), downloaded from memory cards, the mobile network and Wi-Fi, transmitted by Bluetooth or beamed over infrared connections.