Spam and Phishing

Incidents

Encrypted Java Archive Trojan bankers from Brazil

I have never bought a PlayStation and neither has my colleague Micha-san from Japan – well, in his case, at least not from Brazil. Nonetheless, we both received the same email notification: In this instance cybercriminals from Brazil have used a new, yet very strange technique – spreading Trojan bankers via .Jar files. I say strange because even if

Incidents

Scammers Heading to the Olympics

The XXII Winter Olympic Games officially get under way on 7 February. Of course, this major sporting event has not gone unnoticed by the spammers. The “Nigerian” scammers couldn’t resist either: at the end of January we received an interesting mailing from someone looking for a trustworthy person in Russia who they could transfer 850,000 euros to.

Incidents

Millionaires Want to Share Their Money

Letters about lottery wins are a standard trick used by “Nigerian” scammers. Very often, the author of such letters will explain that he is the happy winner of a multi-million lottery win, and he doesn’t know how to spend the unexpected windfall, and has decided to turn to philanthropy. Over the last few months, we

Research

Big Box LatAm Hack (2nd part – Email Brute-force and Spam)

To complement the already mentioned findings, the same cybercriminal’s server contains additional interesting things but before mentioning them, I want to give a little bit more information about the email database used to spam victims to infect them with the Betabot malware. E-mail database How big is the list of email addresses to spam victims? It has

Incidents

Black Gold, or a Black Hole in Your Pocket

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Russian oil company YUKOS, was recently released from jail. There is a lot of speculation in Russia as to the reasons for his amnesty, while tabloids around the world are watching the ex-businessman’s every step. For ‘Nigerian’ scammers, the news was used as the basis for a tale

Incidents

Olympic Games: Made in China

China is traditionally the leading source of spam in the world, and letters from numerous Chinese manufacturers, producing a huge variety of goods, are constantly present in spam traffic. In our October report we mentioned that these mailings are usually linked in some way to the most popular international holidays. And seeing as how January doesn’t really

Incidents

Mandela’s Millions

In December, we registered ‘Nigerian’ mailings exploiting the theme of Nelson Mandela’s death to trick users. The same topic is still inspiring spam mailings in January – but this time there are some differences in the content – the intro and the author’s signature. At first glance there seemed to be nothing in common between the emails.

Incidents

Nigerian Polyglots

Messages from bank workers or millionaires looking for someone to help them cash in huge sums of money are no longer capable of surprising us. Most of these emails are written in English, which has long been the language of international correspondence – it was unusual to ever see these kinds of messages written in

Spam and phishing reports

Spam in December 2013

Spam in the spotlight In December, spammers continued to honor the traditions of the season and tried to attract potential customers with a variety of original gift and winter vacation offers, taking advantage of the approaching holidays. As usual, they also advertised seasonal goods and services. The news of Nelson Mandela’s death also inspired new

Reports
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