No, not really – but a recent outbreak seems to use no technique at all to get recipients to click on a link to a malware-hosting site. The emails (samples below) have no subject (other than RE: or FW:), no text telling you why you should click on the link, no hidden URLs behind on-screen [...]
Commtouch Security Alliance partners Sunbelt Software, RSA, the Security Division of EMC, and Commtouch held an informative webcast this past Thursday discussing the latest in web security threats. The webcast, entitled “Stormy Web Ahead: A Forecast of Web Security Threats in 2010,” provided essential information needed to understand the web security threats that organizations and [...]
From late May through June, Commtouch Labs noted a sharp rise in the number of new viruses being circulated via email that were not caught by the major anti-virus engines. A new Malware Report released by the company details several outbreaks whose wide distribution caused malware numbers to temporarily and exponentially increase from the rather [...]
What is a Milter?
Sendmail and Postfix are the most popular open-source mail transfer agent (MTA); Sendmail has both free and commercial editions.
Due to the emergence of threats and unwanted content such as viruses and spam, a need arose to filter those messages closer to the perimeter, before they reach the end-user mailbox; however, since both [...]
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) [...]
The recent unrest in the Middle East has become fodder for spammers looking to entice unknowing victims into downloading nasty malware. As we’ve seen in previous outbreaks, spammers use current events (e.g., the financial crisis, elections, major international events) to entice recipients. By masking the origin and tricking users into believing they are legitimate sources, [...]
Cousin Kimmy just sent me a link to a Hallmark holiday e-card. How sweet!
…wait a minute…
I don’t think it’s really from Hallmark.
…wait a minute…
I don’t even have a cousin Kimmy!
Malicious code writers are at it again this holiday season. The latest trend is a plain text or very simple email that looks like it has [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
