Spam and Phishing

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.

When we upload something embarrassing about ourselves to, let’s say Facebook, that’s completely our fault. But there are other subtle ways to get information about us. Let’s say a few words about tracking.

Every time you visit a website you request HTML that will be rendered in your local browser. This code may include external references, so you will request them as well. Nothing to be afraid of so far.

The effective anti-botnet campaign of 2010 resulted in a considerable decrease in the percentage of spam in mail traffic. In 2011 the share of spam averaged 80.26% which continues a downward trend following a peak in 2009.

It’s that time of year again, time to fill out your taxes and pay your part. We’ve seen more than a few examples of Tax and IRS related spam.

In January, more than a month before Valentine’s Day, our spam lab usually starts registering the first emails exploiting the Valentine’s theme

It may not be in the same league as Christmas and New Year, but with every year Valentine’s Day is being exploited more and more by spammers