Spam and Phishing

Currently, the whole world has its eyes glued to TV screens watching the London 2012 Olympic Games. Worldwide interest on this event is so strong that cyber criminals were quick to take advantage of this opportunity and launched multiple campaigns promoting alleged paid online TV programming that would allow users to see live broadcasts of the Olympic Games via the Internet.

The amount of spam in email traffic decreased by 1.9 percentage points compared to May and averaged 71.9%

There are just 11 days to go until the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games in London. With the games fast approaching, now’s a good time for us to issue a gentle reminder about security.

The amount of spam in email traffic decreased by 3.4 percentage points compared to April and averaged 73.8%

Summer 2012 will be packed with sporting events. This week sees the Euro 2012 football championship kick off in Poland and Ukraine.

It seems that development of the main module of SpyEye stopped with last autumn’s version 1.3.48. But just because the authors are not developing this platform further, it doesn’t mean that SpyEye is no longer getting new functions. The core code allows anyone to create and attach their own plugins (DLL libraries). I recently spotted a new plugin for the first time – flashcamcontrol.dll. It turned out that it is used to control the webcam of an infected computer.

The percentage of spam in email traffic was up 2.2 percentage points from March and averaged 77.2%.

Brazil is finally on the way of new cybercrime legislation, at the same time Carolina Dieckmann, a famous Brazilian actress, recently became the victim of cyber attacks that allowed cybercriminals to steal personal property – nude pictures of her- from her computer.

In Q1 of 2012, the share of spam in mail traffic was down 3 percentage points compared to the previous quarter, averaging 76.6%.

The share of spam in email traffic decreased by 3.5 percentage points compared to February and averaged 75%.

On 20 March, we detected a spam campaign targeting passengers of US Airways. After clicking the link from an email a series of redirects eventually leads to a domain hosting BlackHole Exploit Kit.

Q: What is the Hlux/Kelihos botnet?
A: Kelihos is Microsoft’s name for what Kaspersky calls Hlux. Hlux is a peer-to-peer botnet with an architecture similar to the one used for the Waledac botnet. It consists of layers of different kinds of nodes: controllers, routers and workers.

The amount of spam in email traffic was up 2.3 percentage points compared to January and averaged 78.5%

Sweden recently experienced a large banking scam where over 1.2 million Swedish kronor (about $177,800) were stolen by infecting the computers of multiple victims.

The following statistics were compiled in February using data collected from computers running Kaspersky Lab products: 143,574,335 web-borne infections were prevented.