Spam and Phishing

The now-notorious arsenal of ‘Nigerian’ tricks has been enriched with yet a new scam. A Peter Gamba (or Gamaba?) from Uganda is asking for help: in his homeland he faces the threat of persecution for his sexual orientation. The sender claims he is threatened with jail or even death. But he has money – $3,300,000.

Offers to work as a mystery shopper are a common trick used by fraudsters. They give you a chance to work in your free time, and if you agree, they send you a fake check with a huge sum of money, which is supposed to compensate the costs of goods and research. Any remaining money

In January we detected a phishing mailing that was sent on behalf of Apple. The messages contained an offer to purchase a card giving a discount of 150 euros in any European AppStore for only 9 euros. The senders also underlined that only valued customers were eligible to receive the card. To place an order

January saw spammers switch their attention from Christmas and New Year to St. Valentine’s Day. English- and Russian-language mass mailings offering video surveillance systems were yet another popular trend in January.

The tales spun by Nigerian scammers often amaze with their ability to exploit and adapt the same type of scam to a whole variety of situations. Most of these situations are tragic, either related to someone’s death or political turmoil. That’s why an attempt to give away one’s money (or huge part of it) as

Spammers are relentless in their attempts to bypass anti-spam filters and confuse recipients of spam. Recently we detected a mass mailing disguised as an automated reply to a request to unsubscribe from a news blog. The authors noted their regret at losing one of their subscribers and asked if the user really wanted to unsubscribe.

There are plenty of fraudulent messages with the content along the lines of “your email address won a million dollars in a lottery, please contact us to claim your prize”. Internet scammers use this trick to trick users into giving away money: before they can claim their alleged prize the “lucky winners” have to pay

The festive season with its gifts, decorations and costumes can easily put a dent in your finances. No wonder then that after the holidays spam started appearing with suggestions on how to make some money. And increasingly spammers are using bitcoins – a cryptocurrency – as the bait. For instance, bitcoins can be earned in

2014 sees two huge sporting events taking place: the football World Cup in Brazil and the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. In November we mentioned a mailing exploiting the World Cup – the fraudsters disguising their scam as a lottery. In January the number of these kinds of mailings increased. The stories used in the

The Olympic Games are a huge event. And scammers are obviously going to try and exploit the interest they generate.

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

The largest website in Sweden; Aftonbladet is spreading malware.

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.

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

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