We have received a lot of positive feedback for our three-part paper on KOOBFACE (I, II, III) from all parts of the IT industry, but how the malware authors themselves have chimed in.

The KOOBFACE gang (who are attempting to make people believe that they are a legitimate company) have left a Christmas message on each of their infected hosts. Part of this message includes personal messages for several members of the security industry—ourselves included:

Trend Micro (http://trendmicro.com), especially personal thanks to Jonell Baltazar, Joey Costoya, and Ryan Flores, who had released a very cool document (with three parts!) describing all our mistakes we’ve ever made

This is not the first time cybercriminals have left messages for the security industry. In fact, we posted another blog entry on this last year.

Nice to see we are causing these groups some annoyance, something we definitely plan to continue in 2010.

Happy new year everyone!