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Spammers Turn to Free Web Hosting Services

In a new report, McAfee says spammers are taking to Web hosting services in a big way. Spammers are increasingly turning to free-hosting Websites to provide spam URLs, according to a new report from McAfee.

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A few insights on Twitter hackers and phishers

Twitter "is without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening right now." That's, of course, according to Twitter. And it seems Twitter's hackers agree, according to Michael Benidt, of Golden Compass, a Colorado-based computer training company that has studied the effects of Twitter hacking and how such incidents can damage the reputations of users.

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Microsoft: Scareware, PDF exploits rise

The use of scareware and exploits that take advantage of common file formats like PDF, Excel and Word rose in the second half of last year as online scammers realized people are getting smarter about recognizing spam and phishing e-mails, according to a Microsoft security report released on Wednesday.

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Spam in the Neighborhood

It seems like everyone is putting out their spam stats this week. It was inevitable that mass mailers would begin using more localized information to target their spam at end users, if you think about it they've already been doing that for a long time, depending on what language the messages display when they arrive in your inbox.

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How to detect a spammer in Twitter

This is a visual test to distinguish a real Twitter account from a spammer's account. It's very easy. If the account has been recently created and already has many followings and few followers, the username is nonsense and in the section web there is a URL of a service like Tinyurl, it is almost certainly a spammer.

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Photo site hit by internal phishing attack

The iStockphoto image-selling website has been hit by a brazen phishing attack, which attempts to fool account holders into giving up their site logins. The danger of the attack appears to be its unusual method - strike from within.

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Spammers break Live Hotmail's CAPTCHA yet again

The process starts in the same way as did previous CAPTCHA-breaking attacks, using bot-controlled zombie PCs under remote control to fill in the main fields -- name, password, country -- asked for by Hotmail during signup.

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Christmas Lures Being Distributed Via Spam

Websense Security Labs ThreatSeeker Network has discovered that malware authors are already using Christmas themes this year as a social engineering tactic, in an effort to gain control over compromised machines.

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Orkut Message Notification Malicious Spam

Websense Security Labs ThreatSeeker Network has discovered a new, malicious social-engineering spam campaign that is disguised as an official email sent from Google's Web 2.0 social networking site, Orkut.

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Phishing, e-mail money laundering scams on the rise

As the economy worsens and more people get laid off, online fraud and financial scams are rising, security experts say. Many of the scams lure people in with promises of quick and easy money. For instance, there has been a marked increase in money mule recruitment scams for people to transfer funds online between countries, and other illegal work-related spam in recent months, security firm Panda said on Thursday.

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US Treasury Warns of Phishing, Redirects to Malicious Sites

The email message gives details on the supposed phishing attack and adds that the US Treasury Department has also monitored a high level of illegal wire transfers. Having told recipients that, the email message then informs them of restrictions imposed on federal wire transfers as part of security measures being taken by concerned government agencies.

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Bogus MS Update Comes With Malicious Attachment

Just in time for Microsoft's most recent security advisory, spammers are now distributing yet another fake Microsoft Update. It arrives with the subject Security Update for OS Microsoft Windows and purports to come from the Microsoft Official Update Center. It even includes a Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) Signature block to give it more authenticity.

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Dual Curses: Viruses and Spam

Slammer. Bugbear.B. Blaster. Sobig.F. 2003 was the worst year for virus outbreaks in the 20-year history of computer viruses, declares a report by F-Secure Corp. in San Jose. It was a growth year for spam, too, and by December, 62.7% of all global e-mail was spam, say researchers at U.K.-based MessageLabs Inc.

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Spammed SWF URLs Abuse ImageShack, Lead to Rogue AV

We're seeing a lot of spam right now using the now annoyingly familiar Free Update Windows XP,Vista spam template. This time though, instead of linking to an .EXE file, it is now pointing to an .SWF file.The technique used in the spam has two things going for it: 1. the use of SWF instead of EXE and 2. the use of an ImageShack-hosted file, both of which may suggest to normal users that the file is possibly harmless.

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Six botnets the culprit of 85 percent of all global spam

According to recent data compiled by Internet security company Marshal, only six botnets are responsible for more than 85 percent of all global e-mail spam. Overall, the Srizbi botnet is generally recognized as being the largest single source of spam, accounting for almost 40 percent of spam e-mail messages globally.

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PayPal Closes a Phishing Vulnerability

It looks like the PayPal login page, but some things are off. For one, the title is "Login - PayPal Phishing Proof of Concept". That is because this isn't the PayPal login page at all, but a Phishing proof of concept. It was hosted on PayPal's servers and secured with PayPal's security certificates, but I had complete control over all the HTML, including where the login form sent usernames and passwords. This page would not have been caught by any of today's anti-phishing programs, because thanks to a vulnerability, PayPal itself was serving this page.

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Fraudsters offer IRS Tax Refund

McAfee Avert Labs has received reports of a new phishing attack that purports to be from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS). This email attack is similar to IRS phish campaigns seen before and offers victims a $375.20 refund directly to their credit card for filling in an online form.The phish is hosted on a legitimate website based in the United States that deals with special effects for Halloween and movie props.

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To Open or Not to Open

Go on any security Web site and their best practices state that you should “never view, open, or execute any email attachment unless the attachment is expected and the purpose of the attachment is known.” But what if it’s your job to open attachments? In this day and age, human resources (HR) managers post job openings online to get the widest possible distribution. Gone are the days of newspaper ads and window postings; managers want to attract as many qualified applicants as possible and Web postings are inexpensive and effective.

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Fake RootkitBuster Busted!

A URL link to a Trojan posing as a copy of the Trend Micro RootBuster is currently being spammed in the wild.It was found that the email containing the said malicious URL is being spammed to members registered to certain freeware download domains, such as www. bestfreewaredownload.com and betterwindowssoftware.com.

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Top 10 Malware and Spam List 2007

Peed bot – aka "Storm Worm" aka "Nuwar" – was number one on the BitDefender® Top 10 malware list for 2007. According to BitDefender Labs, the spread of the Peed bot has placed it higher that the prolific category of trojan downloaders by almost 10 percent overall, at 33.94 percent of total detections in the past twelve months.

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Google Toolbar: Beware of Buttons

The Google toolbar has found yet another use: as a possible malware vector. Researcher Aviv Raff has released a proof-of-concept (PoC) code, which demonstrates how an attacker may install malicious software or conduct phishing attacks by prompting the user to install a new Google toolbar button.

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Orkut spam worm spotted!

I analyzed some suspicious scrap “2008 vem ai… que ele comece mto bem para vc” from a bunch of friends on Orkut. For a while it was all over Orkut!! Translated to English, it reads “2008 is coming…I wish that it begins quite well for you”.

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MySpace Phishing

myspaceBreaking into someone else's MySpace account has gotten a lot of press recently, with a nasty fight between celebrity hotties Shanna Moakler, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton. But assuming you're not Paris, why would anyone want your MySpace password? And assuming you're smarter than Paris and don't use your dog's name, how would they get that password?

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Spam e card hides Trojan sting in its tail

spam1Computer users have been warned of a spam campaign that poses as an electronic postcard in an attempt to lure the unwary into downloading a web based Trojan. Sophos reported that it has intercepted hundreds of the messages, which contain the subject line 'You have received a postcard!'.

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Paris Hilton image spam scams spread malware

spam1The same group of hackers who last week promised nude photographs of Britney Spears is now believed to be mass spamming messages that contain a clickable image of Paris Hilton and porn star Jenna Jameson all leading to websites hosting a variety of recently patched exploits.

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Awareness of phishing driving malware writers to other means

phishingAlthough the targets of crimeware writers looking to gain financially from their exploits tend to be larger financial institutions located in Europe or Asia, it's likely that North America will see more online fraud using rootkits and other forms of crimeware in the coming years.

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Fortinet spots malware, phishing on Google Blogger.com pages

googleHundreds of weblogs on Google's Blogger.com platform are being used in phishing attacks or to disseminate malware, according to research released this week by Fortinet. Some traffic to the malicious blogs is being driven by a variant of the Stration mass mailing worm, according to an advisory on Fortinet’s website.

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Spear Phishing

pharming1Spear phishers gather information, usually on the Internet, about an individual, and then craft a personalized email more likely to dupe the mark. According to the FBI, the personalization method has proved so profitable that a significant number of spear phishers, principally located outside the United States, began applying it to death-threat extortion emails for the first time last December. FBI spokeswoman Cathy Milhoan says the problem is "huge."

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'Drive by Pharming' Attacks Potential Threat to Broadband Users

pharming1Researchers at Symantec and the Indiana University School of Informatics have uncovered a new threat to broadband users. The attack, nicknamed "Drive by Pharming", uses JavaScript on a Web site created by a hacker to reconfigure broadband routers. Once the user clicks on a link, the malicious JavaScript code changes the DNS settings on the user's router so that every time the user logs on to a Web site, DNS resolution will be performed by the attacker.

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Adult Spam Has Been Going Down

spam1Security firm Symantec dropped its latest report onto the Internet, and noted how spam activity for January held pretty consistent with trends they have seen over previous months. Spam continues to be a massive inbox pest. Symantec said there was a little good news, as the total spam seen at the SMTP layer dropped to about 69 percent.

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