Okay, I did just coin the term “AV Friday” as a joke and it’s not to be taken too seriously. So what is AV Friday all about? Many people living in the US will be familiar with the term Black Friday: the day after Thanksgiving and generally the busiest retail shopping day of the year in the US. Some may have heard of the term Cyber Monday, which refers to the Monday immediately after Black Friday and thought to be the ceremonial kick-off, or busiest day, of the holiday online shopping season in the US between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Having both of these days in mind made me wonder, what was the busiest antivirus-protection day for Symantec over the last year? For fun, AV Friday was born.
On Friday, April 17, 2009 Symantec antivirus signatures reported protecting over 3.5 million customers. This works out at roughly 40...
Is your wish to spend the upcoming holidays in Hawaii or the Bahamas? With the recent increase in the volume of airline ticket spam, spammers have made it seem easy to grab cheap (or even free) airline tickets to your favorite destinations. During the holiday season many people travel to visit family and friends. In the current economic environment, cheap deals on airfare will attract users’ attention and spammers take full advantage of this fact.
Symantec researchers are observing an increase in spam that is offering cheap airline tickets or gift vouchers to use towards a purchase of airline tickets. Spam messages are originating with spoofed email addresses, such as “AirlineTickets@spam-domain” and “Free.Airline.Tickets@spam-domain.” The link provided in the message redirects the user to an online form where the user’s personal information and credit card details are requested.
The top 20 headlines used in airline ticket spam are...
Phishers are constantly targeting newer brands from diverse industries, with the sole motive of fraudulently acquiring a large amount of users’ confidential information for financial gains. Symantec has observed and followed up with some recent trends in phishing attacks targeting some of the popular online gaming websites. Since the beginning of this year there has been a steady rise in phishing attacks on gaming websites.
Why and How?
The primary motive of fraudsters is to seek out users’ confidential information, such as the login details for online gaming websites. The sample shown below is of a typical phishing Web page created by the fraudsters, which mimics a popular online gaming website. To trick users into trusting the phishing website, the phishers add a widget (to monitor online visitors) that will display some random number of purported online users visiting the site at a given time.
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Once again Zeus is up to its old tricks with a new twist. The latest spam run informs users that their latest Social Security statement is available but it may contain errors. The subject of the mail will be something like “Review annual Social Security statement“ and the body warns of a potential identity theft risk and asks you to review your annual statement at the link they provide.
Figure 1. An example of the Spam
If you follow this link you will arrive at the following page:
It's only been a couple of short weeks since the iPhone background-changing incident that took the world by storm (well, parts of Australia at least), but already a Dutch ISP has reported what would be the first malicious iPhone worm to be seen in the wild.
Unfortunate news to be sure, but not exactly surprising. Our two recent blogs relating to iPhone threats warned (and I quote) that 'the publicly released code could easily be altered so that consequences were not so benign'. In case you missed them, the first blog was about the Ikee rickroller, which wasn't really considered malicious in that it only changed the iPhone background to a picture of 80's pop singer Rick Astley and was really more of a warning from the creator that jailbroken iPhones in a certain state could be compromised. That incident...
A new exploit targeting Internet Explorer was published to the BugTraq mailing list yesterday. Symantec has conducted further tests and confirmed that it affects Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 as well. The exploit currently exhibits signs of poor reliability, but we expect that a fully-functional reliable exploit will be available in the near future. When this happens, attackers will have the ability to insert the exploit into Web sites, infecting potential visitors. For an attacker to launch a successful attack, they must lure victims to their malicious Web page or a Web site they have compromised. In both cases, the attack requires JavaScript to exploit Internet Explorer.
The exploit targets a vulnerability in the way Internet Explorer uses cascading style sheet (CSS) information. CSS is used in many Web pages to define...
I had the honor recently of moderating a virtual roundtable discussion on the top Internet security trends from 2009 and what we expect to see in the security threat landscape in 2010. Funny thing about security predictions—you hope they won’t come true, but expect them to anyway. The roundtable featured expert panelists Paul Wood (Senior Analyst, MessageLabs Intelligence, Symantec) and Zulfikar Ramzan (Technical Director, Symantec Security Response). They each have unique insights into the world of cybercrime, spam, phishing attacks, and other cyberthreats that plague us all.
We want to give a big thanks to everyone who joined in to listen to our experts, and we hope you found it interesting. For those of you who couldn’t make it, please take a few minutes to listen to the podcast of the actual roundtable.
We are monitoring new malicious attacks that look similar to the fake "Microsoft Outlook reconfigure" spam campaign messages we have been observing for the last couple of months. That malicious campaign was followed by attacks on social networking sites, transforming from malicious code attacks into URL-based phishing attacks. These new attacks have similar traits, such as the spoofed “From” headers, which aggressively target and baffle enterprise users, and a subject line that is intended to cause panic (for obvious reasons—have a look at the example image below).
As seen in the message above, the mail attachment is a zipped file named “utility.zip” that extracts an executable detected as Trojan.Dropper by Symantec antivirus. Using...
Zeus is a botnet package that allows for the easy creation and command and control of a botnet. We've discussed Zeus previously in Zeus, King of the Underground Crimeware Toolkits. The main purpose of Zeus is to steal online credentials such as online banking passwords, but it can be configured to steal passwords from any online site.
Today, the BBC is reporting that police in the UK have arrested two suspects in relation to Zeus. While the details are preliminary, the two likely appear to be users of the Zeus botnet package rather than the actual creators, and thus the prevalence and usage of Zeus is likely to continue.
We've created a research paper providing more in-depth information on Zeus, including how the bot is created, what functionality it has, and additional screenshots on...
Yes, it’s a cheap trick and not even close to original. But the lesson here is that even obvious social engineering tricks can get people to click on a link. We can’t help ourselves. We love to click. Clicking on links and attachments that are accompanied by just the slightest bit of social engineering appears to be a basic human need. I expect it to show up in a revision of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs any day now—behind love, but certainly ahead of safety.
I do have a point to all this. Two actually. As we compiled the Security Trends to Watch in 2010, what occurred to me is that the people who most needed to read this information never will. At least not without some social engineering on my part. And since social engineering plays such a prominent role in future trends, it seemed appropriate. So I’ve decided to use this little trick to get people to...
The Security Response team has compiled the top security trends of 2009. We pulled data from the Global Intelligence Network and the experiences of the thousands of analysts and security experts at Symantec to come up with the top trends for the year. While none of these trends will be a surprise to anyone even casually following the threat landscape, when compiled and summarized, it is clear that the breadth of security problems in the past year was pretty stunning.
For example:
• Toolkits and threat recycling have made malware easier to create than ever
• Polymorphic technology is being applied to make threats harder to catch
• Botnets, large and small, are used as the foundation of attacks making most attacks complex
• All major news events are used for social engineering
• Major brands are being appropriated by cybercriminals...
On November 4, 2009, Marsh Ray published detailed information about a vulnerability that affects the TLS/SSL protocols and allows for limited man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. We say “limited” because the attack exploiting this issue would be different from traditionally viewed MITM attacks, which would involve an attacker placing themselves in the middle of the SSL session between a client and a server and being able to intercept, view, and modify any requests or responses exchanged by the two communicating parties. In an attack using this recent TLS vulnerability, due to the way SSL-enabled applications handle the session-renegotiation process, an attacker may inject arbitrary plaintext into the beginning of the application protocol stream. This can affect multiple protocols that can communicate over an SSL session, such as HTTPS, IMAP, POPS, SIP, etc. Note that in this attack, the attacker would have no ability (at least...
Finally, some help with explaining Internet security to my non-geek friends! The Guide to Scary Internet Stuff video series will hopefully make my life a little easier. Explaining the intricacies of Internet security is a challenging task. I often have difficulty explaining to my non-technical friends and relatives why they need to know about risks on the Internet. On top of that, I sometimes discover that my advice has fallen on deaf ears as I inevitably fix their computers after a click on a spam or phishing link, or after they have not run Windows Update or updated their antivirus software in a while.
Although this is not the normal technical type of material that we post here on the Security Response blog, when Dominic Cook from our UK PR team showed me these, I immediately thought they were worth a post. The animations are fun, but most of all I think my friends will understand them, remember some of the advice,...
When trawling the Web today we came across a website that has been compromised and rigged so that it is returned in search engine results for many different search terms. The site in question belongs to a UK-based company that specializes in hiring out holiday homes and is a legitimate business. However, the site has been compromised and is being used in a major ongoing SEO-based misleading applications attack, and has been for some time now. As you can see in the sample search results below, you may wonder what college football, a Ukraine vs. Greece soccer match, Penn State basketball, and Robin Williams have to do with renting a holiday home—and with good reason, too.
The key to identifying malicious pages in the search results is...
Phishing attacks jeopardize users’ personal information, including banking credentials. The huge gain that Internet miscreants receive from these attacks drives them to think of newer and more effective bait to phish users’ personal data. To carry out their plans, spammers most commonly abuse new security services/features provided by legitimate companies.
Many financial institutions have already started providing a pin/password generator device (also known as “secret reader”) for their customers to conduct secure online transactions. The device generates random pin codes after a specified interval of time. In a recent phishing attack the fraudsters promoted a similar secret reader.
This fake message claims that a bank has developed a secret reader that generates a password of 10 alphanumeric characters. The message also targets existing customers who are already using this device provided by the bank, and informs them that existing device will...
