Spam and Phishing

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.

Once again, it’s time for us to deliver our customary retrospective of the key events that have defined the threat landscape in 2013. Let’s start by looking back at the things we thought would shape the year ahead, based on the trends we observed in the previous year. The full report is available here.

Spam in the spotlight In October, spammers continued to actively use the names of well-known companies to spread malicious ZIP files. We registered several mass mailings offering rather unusual, if not to say exotic, services – love spells, incantations to enhance careers and other forms of white and black magic. There were significantly more mailings

In early November Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Philippines, with a catastrophic numbers of victims – several thousand were reported killed, while hundreds of thousands were evacuated. A few days after the typhoon struck we detected the first “Nigerian letters” in which scammers were exploiting the tragedy for their own selfish ends. The author of the

Two days ago FireEye reported that the recent CVE-2013-3906 exploit has begun to be used by new threat actors other than the original ones. The new infected documents share similarities with previously detected exploits but carry a different payload. This time these exploits are being used to deliver Taidoor and PlugX backdoors, according to FireEye. At Kaspersky

Back in March 2012 we teamed up with Crowdstrike, the Honeynet Project and Dell SecureWorks in disabling the second version of the Hlux/Kelihos-Botnet. We thought that now would be a good time for an update on what has happened to that sinkhole-server over the last 19 months. What we see now is what we expected. The botnet

I just received a spam e-mail in Portuguese stating that my mailbox had exceeded its maximum storage.

Since we published our first blog post about the mobile Trojan Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.Svpeng, the cybercriminals have improved its functionalities. Now Svpeng is capable of phishing as well, trying to harvest the financial data of users.

The quarter in figures The percentage of spam in total email traffic decreased by 2.4 percentage points from the second quarter of 2013 and came to 68.3%. The percentage of phishing emails grew threefold and accounted for 0.0071%. Malicious attachments were detected in 3.9% of all emails – 1.6 percentage points more than in Q2

Spam in the spotlight After the September cold snap we recorded a lot of mass mailings about offers to cut heating bills and keep homes warm. They often appeared in both Russian and English-language spam. A large proportion of September mass mailings offered auto insurance services and adverts for printing services, particularly calendars for 2014.

The continuing conflict and the complex political situation in Syria have created the perfect conditions for new ‘Nigerian’ scams. In recent months, there has been a surge in the number of Nigerian letters that contained some sort of reference to Syria; scammers sent messages both in the names of ordinary citizens of that country and