Spam and Phishing

Join Roel Schouwenberg and myself as we explore what AV tests are about today and reflect on what is important for people using these tests to make an informed decision about buying protection for themselves and their families.

Over the last couple of days we’ve been noticing a few pharmacy spam mails which are a bit different. Somebody seems to have replaced the original graphical content with an alert highlighting that such messages are malicious.

In recent spam mails we have often noticed links to *.html files with random names. Another trend is that the cybercriminals do not even bother to register domains for their dirty deeds but simply plant their malicious code on compromised hosts. “Simply?” one may ask and sadly the answer seems to be “yes” based on our observations.

As part of our general information sharing activity, we have launched a series of webcasts on YouTube.

At last! What every football fan has been dreaming of. The start of World Cup 2010!

In the last two weeks thousands of Facebook users fell for a so-called likejacking scam. A link on Facebook invites you to see for example the 101 hottest women in the world and leads you to an external website.

Backdoors distributed as fake YouTube toolbars.

Some months ago my colleague Roel Schouwenberg wrote a blog post about a money mule recruitment campaign through Facebook. We’ve been monitoring this activity and found new, quite active and successful campaigns of the same recruitment purpose and in the same social network but with a bit different approach: creating groups to follow.

In the first quarter of 2010, the percentage of spam in email traffic averaged 85.2%. This figure coincides with the final result for 2009.

Today our spam traps detected a letter like this in which the fraudsters were trying to swindle users out of out their activation codes for…Kaspersky Lab products!

This week I received a letter from American Express which stated that my credit card had been temporarily blocked because of potential fraudulent activity.

Yesterday we received a very enticing email offering users the chance to earn loads of money for just one hour of work per day.

For over a week users of Gmail have been exchanging stories about incidents of email accounts being compromised and the uncontrolled distribution of spam.

For the second day in a row the topic of Nigerian spammers has cropped up

Last week we received a mass mailing that at first glance appeared no different from the usual mailbox clutter