After distributing outlandish headlines for months, malware distributors have taken the next logical step and are starting to package them together in email newsletters, more specifically, pretending to be “CNN Daily Top 10″ headline email newsletters. Here is a sample email:
Each enticing headline in the message links to a malware site, not to CNN, [...]
OK the title is a lousy play on words, but the new spam tactic with hyperlinks to Flash files is actually pretty neat. You most likely know by now that spammers will look for any way to bypass content-based anti-spam filters. And they tried a new trick today: sending spam messages whose hyperlink call to [...]
I may have disappeared for the last couple weeks, but the spam and malware did not, so this post is a roundup of various outbreaks that I wasn’t able to report on at the moment they happened. In parentheses is the date I would have (should’ve could’ve) reported on these items had I been truly [...]
Commtouch recently announced our Q2 email threat trend report, which indicated, among other things:
Spam levels throughout the second quarter averaged 77%, ranging from a low of 64% to a peak of 94% of all email towards the end of the quarter
10 [...]
Is there any holiday spammers and malware writers won’t celebrate? This just in from our detection center - blended threat emails along a July 4 Independence Day theme, with Subjects like “Happy July 4″ and content… well see for yourself in the example below:
Don’t click on links in emails like this, folks… guaranteed to turn [...]
Spam in Chinese is problematic for traditional content-filtering anti-spam engines for several reasons:
Chinese characters are “double-byte”, as opposed to “single-byte” like non-Asian languages. The second byte is due to the fact that one byte isn’t enough to transmit all the necessary information since the alphabet is so much larger than western languages like, for example, [...]
I guess I should be happy spammers are still sending pump & dump spam, since of course blocking this garbage provides Commtouch’s bread & butter, but still, as a human being (not a marketer for an anti-spam company), sometimes I just throw up my hands and ask “WHY??!!!!!” I mean, do people really fall for [...]
Commtouch detection team identified a new email-borne malware outbreak yesterday, another in the “love” themed attacks. It is a blended threat, with simple love-oriented subjects, and within the body of the email message a hyperlink to a site that downloads a malware file - a Storm worm variant known as Zhelatin or Nuwar. Our lab [...]
What do you get when a scammer scams a scammer? I guess you could call that scam squared. Perhaps there used to be honor among thieves, but not anymore. Check out this spam message targeted at, no, not unsuspecting purchasers of fake meds, but at those people who are selling the stuff!
Now, it’s not so [...]
Blogspot has been a popular hosting site for spammers, and even malware distributors, but Arik from the detection team informs me that we are now starting to see outbreaks using hyperlinks to a different, less popular blog site, known as blogdrive.
This particular outbreak uses misspelled pornographic subject lines of around four words each; it seems [...]
