Spam and Phishing

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

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

Recently, though, we saw a series of messages persistently sent to the same email address. Apparently, the attacker’s main goal was to infect that computer – all emails, no matter what their headers were, contained Email-Worm.Win32.NetSky.q.

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.

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

PDF Version The year in figures The proportion of spam in email flows was 69.6% in 2013, which is 2.5 percentage points lower than in 2012 The percentage of emails with malicious attachments was 3.2%, which is 0.2 percentage points lower than in 2012 32.1% of phishing attacks targeted social networks The greatest amount of

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

We just received a spam message in Portuguese stating the following: In short, this message says that WhatsApp for PC is finally available and that the recipient already has 11 pending invitations from friends in his account. This is what the email looks like: If the victim clicks on the link, it will lead him/her to a

Introduction Last week a good friend (@Dkavalanche) mentioned in his twitter account his findings of a Betabot malware which was spammed via fake emails in the name of Carabineros of Chile. It piqued my attention so I dug a little bit and this is what I found: The original .biz domain used in the malicious campaign was bought

Introduction Today we got a spam message with a fake e-card in Portuguese leading to an interesting piece of malware: Header translation: You got a Christmas e-card. Somebody very special has sent this Christmas e-card for you. In case you are not able to visualize it, click here. Much better than any present is a

Spam in the spotlight In November we saw a large number of spam messages offering seasonal and full-time jobs. This comes as a surprise for this time of the year: the labor market is experiencing a “low season” as the end of the fiscal year approaches. This type of spam often didn’t contain any specific

In our search for various types of malicious code for Mac we recently came across a rather interesting peculiarity in Safari. It turns out that Safari for Mac OS, like many other contemporary browsers, can restore the previous browsing session. In other words, all the sites that were open in the previous session – even

In 2014 we expect significant growth in the number of threats related to economic and domestic cyber-espionage, with cyber-mercenaries/cyber-detectives playing an active role in such attacks. The full report is available here

Spammers actively spread malware using fake notifications on behalf of various financial and banking institutions, booking and delivery services and other companies.

Last week, Kaspersky Lab identified a mass mailing of phishing letters sent in the name of leading IT security providers.