From a site that is hacked and serving phishes: What’s mildly interesting is the types of phishes — “speciality phishes” that are not your typical banking/finance scam. These are phishes that are highly targeted, in this case at email systems of tiny Hamiltom College (not the first time I’ve seen this), the religious site cfaith.com,…
I recently had an interesting message arrive in my system; after viewing the message, 100% of those polled agreed on what it was. What do you think? What do YOU see? If you answered spam, you’re on your way to having the mentality of a spam analyst. This message has many hallmarks of classic unsolicited…
Activities associated with Koobface have increased during the month of December. Often it is for the sending of traffic to compromised servers in order to obtain more servers. Other times the activity centers around using those same compromised servers to proxy users to malicious domains that are then used for further distribution of malware or…
Atif Mushtaq, a researcher at FireEye security company, has coordinated a global effort to take down of one of the top 10 botnets – Mega-D. PC world said the botnet controlled 250,000 machines in a massive network that was responsible for nearly 12 percent of world spam according to Message Labs statistics. Mushtaq and those…
For those of you that are having to put up with looking after your parents over Christmas: Would you much rather selfishly indulge yourselves with partying? A kindly spammer has a very seasonal Christmas Eve message offering to make this the last year that you will have to “put up” with the burdens of family…
Crime traditionally increases during the holiday season, and cybercrime is no different. The malware writers, spammers and scammers are out in force. They’ve recently hit “Odnoklassniki” with this message: “Hi! I’ve got a New year surprise for you [emoticon] send 2133 279 (must be with a space) to 4460 and you’ll be pleasantly surprised! If…
Well, it didn’t take long for the Christmas E-Card scams to start. Recently we have seen email messages pretending to be from Hallmark, suggesting that you have received an E-card from a friend. The complete email message looks like this:You have recieved a Hallmark E-Card from your friend. To see it, check the link below:…
Almost the entire year 2009, the battle for the first place on phishing targets took place between Ebay and Chase Bank. Most of the time, the Chase Bank was on top of the most phished brands. In December, the situation was changed: Now PayPal is the most phished brand (32205 unique URLs) followed from far…
As was announced on Dec 11th, CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) now requires a “formal paper based application material when making the online application to the registrar.” The motivation behind this seems more related to cracking down on porn sites, but since .cn domains have been the call-to-action in 35-50% of all spam being…
Starting at ~3:20pm GMT today, Canadian Pharmacy spammers began using attached MP3 files as the call-to-action for their latest campaign. The message had no subject, no “text” body content, just an attached “audio/mpeg” file with a random lower case file name. Upon playing the attached mp3 file, you find out why I called it the…