Spam and Phishing

Here’s the latest of our malware wallpaper calendars.

It is a well-known fact that events of global interest are exploited by cybercriminals for financial gain. The current situation in Japan is no exception.

In some Eastern European countries (Russia and Ukraine especially), there are legal loopholes that allow the use of SMS premium rate numbers anonymously. In addition, some Russian mobile operators allow people to transfer money from prepaid SIM cards to bank accounts or credit cards. When combined, these two things allow cyber-crime activity that generate illegal profits. In this issue of Lab Matters webcast, Kaspersky Lab malware researcher Denis Maslennikov discusses this component of mobile security and talks about the ways cyber-criminals are maliciously exploiting prepaid SIM cards and money transfers. Maslennikov also describes the main pillar of the underground economy and ecosystem of his type of fraud.

The revolutions spreading across the Arab world have grabbed the attention of people across the globe, including cybercriminals: so-called “Nigerian” spam emails have recently appeared claiming to be from a variety of “relatives” of Gaddafi and Mubarak.

Kaspersky Lab malware researcher Vicente Diaz joins the Lab Matters webcast to discuss the banking malware epidemic in Europe and offer suggestions for consumers doing business on the Web.

Head of Content Analysis and Research Darya Gudkova joins Ryan Naraine on this episode of Lab Matters to talk about the use of spam e-mails to launch malware attacks.

Here’s the latest of our malware wallpaper calendars.

In this edition of the Lab Matters webcast, malware researcher Tillmann Werner and Ryan Naraine discuss the ongoing battle to control the Conficker botnet and the need for the computer security industry to consider newer approaches to mitigating the botnet epidemic.

When I was checking Facebook this morning, I spotted some friends posting the same message all over their friends’ walls.

The earthquake and tsunami related crisis in Japan is still far from over – so is the appearance of new cyber threats trying to exploit that same crisis.

The end of 2010 was a rather bad time to be a spammer. Thanks to an industry-wide effort that included botnet takedowns and legal cases, we saw a dramatic shift in the way spammers used unsolicited e-mail to make money.

The news of the death of Elizabeth Taylor is already being used in social engineering scams on Twitter.

Last week, we published a blog post regarding the ongoing spam campaign using the recent earthquake in Japan to infect users. According to our analysis, it seems that the malicious links from the spam emails lead to websites hosting the Incognito Exploit Kit.

As was predicted by many, email scams soliciting donations for Japan are appearing in user’s inboxes. We took a closer look at one of these messages and identified the following details.

Kaspersky Lab has detected a malicious spam campaign using the recent earthquake in Japan to infect users.