In part 4 (or is it 5 or 6) of our coverage of Google abuse we present a phishing attack targeting adwords users. Actually it’s just a shade over 2 years since we last discussed adwords phishing attacks. This one almost had us convinced for about half a second with some fine phishing touches:
It only targets users [...]
Part 3 in a series of examples where the legitimacy and trust conferred by the Google name has been misused
3) Google birthday scam
The email features standard scam elements but what caught our collective eye is that the huge “winnings” are distributed by Google themselves in honor of their 12th anniversary.
According to our calculations the 12th [...]
Part 2 in a series of examples where the legitimacy and trust conferred by the Google name has been misused
2) Misusing Google Sites
In Google’s words, “Google Sites is a free and easy way to create and share webpages”. Of course there are loads of spammers seeking free webhosting for the usual pharmaceuticals, replicas and porn [...]
Being the number one name on the Web and also offering so many useful services naturally attracts misuse by the shadier side of the Internet. We’ve written in the past about the abuse of google docs and spreadsheets. And in our Q1 trend report we discussed the high percentage of spam emails with forged sender [...]
The Commtouch detection center has confirmed that an email I received yesterday on one of my private accounts was part of a mass phishing attack aimed at Blogger (and Google) users. In this case I suspected it was a phishing email before opening it since I received it via an email address that is not [...]
Next time you have some Viagra to sell or malware to spread, forget those passé, brute-force directory attacks. You don’t have to generate email addresses with all those alphanumeric characters or “typical” names and email structures, such as jane.smith@FORTUNE500COMPANY.com. And you especially don’t have to take days to deliver them slooowly and methodically so corporate [...]
Gmail users have been treated to a fairly strong track record of spamless inboxes thanks to Gmail’s filtering methods. Every now and then, maybe they’d miss one…or maybe they’d falsely mark a legitimate email as spam…but for the most part, Gmail users have been spared large amounts of spam cluttering their inboxes.
Over the last four [...]
It happens to the best of us, really. I’m not sure I ever really think about how humans are involved in the great processes that go into bringing me my Google search results, but over the weekend, this human intervention became obvious. Anyone who used Google between 6:30 a.m. and 7:25 a.m. (Pacific Standard Time) [...]
Trying to log in to your Chinese Gmail or Yahoo! webmail? Check carefully…. over the past few days phishers have spread a broad attack trying to entice users to give up their credentials to a fake login page for Google and Yahoo-reminiscent addresses, with a .cn (China) domain. Examples include (and there are dozens of [...]
There’s been some talk about the latest incarnation of spam that perverts legitimate sites for the purpose of commercial spam, a subject we have been discussing for a while on this blog, starting back in January. A few interesting articles on Google Docs spam came out this week based on some outreach by MessageLabs. (InternetNews, [...]
