About a year or so ago one of the “McMarketeers” decided it would be fun to run a campaign against “fram”–spam that friends send you. As you might guess, we in the Labs have no friends, so it was no problem for us to ridicule the idea. However, around the coffee machine the other day…
Apple yesterday released a huge Safari update that fixes 16 vulnerabilities – six for Windows versions and ten for Mac OS X and Windows. The update, Safari 4.0.5, makes fixes in Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and Windows versions. This is probably pretty significant. In November, the TheInquirer.net of the UK carried a piece about browser…
Del Harvey who leads Twitter’s Trust and Safety team blogged yesterday that the social networking/micro-blogging service has begun filtering all links in Twitter Direct Messages to stop phishing: “Since these attacks occur primarily on Direct Messages and email notifications about Direct Messages, this is where we have focused our initial efforts. For the most part,…
Be on the lookout for websites offering up “free applications” which come with a nasty sting in the tail. Here’s a typical example: Appzkeygen(dot)com If you like videogame consoles, you may be a fan of emulators (programs that ape long dead consoles, allowing you to play old games on your PC – we’ll avoid the…
Hot on the heels of the Patch Tuesday announcements yesterday, came the announcement of a new zero-day in Internet Explorer (CVE-2010-0806). Whilst checking through some URLs supposedly serving up malicious code to exploit this vulnerability, I noticed a link to some spam runs from earlier in the week. On March 8th SophosLabs saw spam messages…
A while ago I was writing about twitter spam and I was trying to make a brief definition of this kind of spam: It follows a lot of users , has 1 post and is followed only by a few persons. Well, this changed now, because the theme became much more interesting for the people…
Exploit code for the the zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer has been added to the Metasploit framework. According to an email HD Moore wrote to ZDNet’s Ryan Naraine, the exploit works quite reliable – successful 50% of the times on Windows XP with SP2 and SP3 with IE7 and deactivated Data Execution Prevention (DEP). The…
I use Google Reader a lot — not only to stay on top of the news, but also to find interesting blog posts and articles. I’m always telling my friends about Google Reader, and while some of them love it, others don’t want to take the time to set it up. For those of you who fall…
As we were working through URLs identified as suspicious due to our GTI technology, one of the URLs that presented itself was an average “.com” site that loaded a php. As we processed this – it was interesting to see that this php actually reached out to download a file that ended with the string…
Swiss security blog Abuse.ch has reported that the worst Zeus botnet hosting ISP was taken off line yesterday, cutting the botnet’s number of servers from 249 to 181 – including the six worse ones. Abuse.ch wrote: “As you can see in the chart above, on March 9th 2010, the number of active ZeuS C&C servers…