Commtouch Labs has run across a brilliant blended threat campaign organized by a body pretending to be the Centers for Disease Control. The attack, originating from Chinese botnets, began on the morning (EST) of 1 December 2009 and is still going strong. By the time of this publication, the attack had been flagged as “massive” [...]
Halloween is always a fun holiday for cybercriminals. Spam, malware, phishing…the works. The Commtouch Labs reported on several different Halloween schemes this season.
One spam attack surfaced in multiple languages. The subjects read like this:
… reduzierte preise fuer halloween! programme fuer pc & mac
… reduction des prix de l’halloween! programmes pour pc et mac
… prezzi piu [...]
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last few days, the big news is that Michael Jackson died. Yes…THAT Michael Jackson. The King of Pop. The Thriller. The one who introduced the world to the Moonwalk and a solitary glittery glove.
In the wake of his untimely death, cyber criminals have used his [...]
Classmates.com has become the latest target in the trend of spam sent from what appears to be legitimate sites. What an emotional roller coaster! Imagine getting nostalgic, dusting off your old yearbooks, digging out your prom dress…
..you go to download the files to watch a little film clip announcing your high school reunion…you anticipate the [...]
The flood of Barack Obama-related spam and malware messages unleashed in the past week does not appear to be abating. What started as a simple blended threat outbreak, offering to show recipients his speech (but instead downloading the malware executable barackobama.exe) has morphed into messages purporting to show an Obama sex scandal.
Outbreak that began November [...]
In case you thought all the e-card malware was sent in English or Russian, of course other nations have their say as well. Here is an example of a recent outbreak of Chinese e-card messages that Arik from the spam analysis team shared with me. This is considered a “blended threat,” that is an email [...]
A new blended threat outbreak started yesterday whose subject lines and contents are strangely reminiscent of the first “Storm” outbreak, which created outlandish headlines to socially engineer people to open the malware. In this case, the headlines are more topical to today, including:
Private investigation report on your colleague
Iran announces completion of nuclear weapon
Afghan captial in [...]
How ironic – malware distributors are using the vulnerabilities inherent in IE (and other browsers) to distribute malware purporting to be an Internet Explorer update!
The spammers did a few things to make the message appear to be legitimately from Microsoft, spoofing a Microsoft from address, and copy-pasting the MSN text into the bottom. Of course, [...]
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 [...]
I know some people get excited about the prospect of a new video of Angelina Jolie (with or without her new twins), but it’s not recommended to download one that ends in “.exe” since it’s most likely malware
Building on the trend from the past few months of using standard MSN messages (links and [...]
