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, [...]
During the past several months, I have met with industry thought leaders in network security products and services to discuss the growing threats of botnets, zombies and other ways to describe the issue of compromised hosts.
One of the topics of conversation: what will the bots do next? And do these swiss-army knives of badware [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Something about the “rockets red glare” of July 4th must have gotten the Storm Wormers in the mood for aggressive action, and the next outbreak has been a faux invasion of Iran, with the following malware web site:
Based on a quick scan of the iran_occupation.exe malware file by VirusTotal, the results show that only 14 [...]
Commtouch Enterprise Anti-Spam Gateway is a nice and very effective product [hey, I am objective:)] that helps enterprises to block spam and virus outbreaks. It’s been out there for a long time and it has a solid base of loyal and happy customers all over the world. I know, because I’ve been supporting this product [...]
Recently there has been a lot of discussion and reports about an increasing amount of NDR messages triggered by spam. Since the NDR problem become a major factor in the spam world, and I noticed that there are some confusion about it, I thought it’s important that I’ll give a short overview of the problem [...]
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, [...]
For some people, hearing about China digging itself out of one of the worst earthquakes in recent memory inspires them to do good works, donate money, join the Peace Corps…. For spammers it is merely inspiration for the next wave of social engineering to attempt to recruit a new army of zombies. Building on human [...]
