Spam and Phishing

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

Malware wallpaper calendars for 2012

Kaspersky Lab malware researcher Tillmann Werner joins Ryan Naraine to talk about the threat from peer-to-peer botnets. The discussions range from botnet-takedown activities and the ongoing cat-and-mouse games to cope with the botnet menace.

At the time of writing there is a new Facebook phishing attack going on. It will not just try to steal your Facebook credentials; it will also try to steal credit card information and other important information such as security questions.

Director of Kaspersky Lab’s global research and analysis team Costin Raiu appears on Lab Matters to discuss the security ramifications of the growing dependence on cloud computing. The discussions center on the convenience of using consumer cloud services and some of the risks involved with outsourcing security to third-parties.

Scammers pretending to be Windows Security Support Technitians calling up people trying to trick them to install remote access tools now targeting Sweden.