The Commtouch Labs recently reported on a spam outbreak that includes the use of the HTML tag <WBR> to bypass traditional spam filters. <WBR> is a tag used to denote an optional line-break — as opposed to the <NOBR> tag, which prevents line breaks in certain areas. The tags can be placed anywhere in the [...]
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 [...]
A notable anniversary slipped by at the weekend with the announcement that the very first ’spam’ email was sent on May 3rd 1978. Long before the Internet became part of everyday life there was Arpanet developed by the US Department of Defense.
According to The Times on May 3rd 2008, it was a marketing person [...]
Now that I have been officially accepted into the “Security Bloggers Group” on LinkedIn (very cool!), I realize it’s time I shared some of my opinions on things rather than simply reporting on this or that malware outbreak (although some of you have indicated to me that the objective reporting of news in the messaging [...]
Scammers are always looking for new ways to hide their intentions, both from message recipients, as well as automated email filters. One new trick Commtouch has started to see recently is the use of calendar-update messages generated from legitimate sites, such as Google or Yahoo. Since these messages need to be generated manually, they only [...]
The original image-based spam embedded images in email messages, however it’s even simpler, and easier to fool anti-spam engines, to embed references to images in the HTML code of a message. What this means is that the source code of the message will pull an image from a remote server, assuming the reader is connected [...]
It was a given that malware writers would roll out a new Valentine’s Day campaign, with the holiday of love just two days away. But who knew that they could be such creative artists with the pictures they choose to deliver their malicious software? OK, they probably stole the valentine’s pics from a legitimate site, [...]
A message promising Paris Hilton topless includes a hyperlink that appears innocent – the words “download it now” link to a page that begins http://www.google.com/pagead/iclk?sa=l&ai=trailhead&num=69803&adurl=http://…
[this link won't work since I've truncated it on purpose].
The site automatically downloads a Trojan malware called “trailer.exe”. Nothing new under the sun….
Pharmaceutical spammers typically include a URL in their emails since they want to direct recipients to visit their site and purchase their (usually counterfeit) viagra, cialis, etc. However URLs are pretty straightforward to block in many anti-spam solutions, so spammers are always looking for new ways to hide their URLs. A [...]
When an email from one our employees to his loan officer asking about re-financing his mortgage got blocked by his bank’s spam filter, we decided to look into the phenomenon a little more closely. Turns out that spammers are leveraging the refinancing fervor that was sparked by the Fed’s rate cut last week, causing a [...]
