Spam and Phishing

Since the beginning of August, our Japan office noticed around 900+ mails of a certain kind in their spam traps.
We noticed two common patterns in all of the mail. First, the links in these spammed messages all point to compromised servers. Also, the file names of the redirectors are all dictionary words followed by two digits.

Malware writers are inventing new attacks regularly – but the anti-virus industry invents new protection techniques just as regularly. Whitelisting is on of the newer protection technology which are now standard in Internet Security products.

Adobe chained installers increase security

Will Microsoft ending support for XP/SP2 create a nirvana for cybercriminals?

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.