Having control over an email account can be a lot of power, even though most people would probably say they do not care if someone else is reading their private emails. But it’s not always about reading those private emails. Of course there have been quite a few attacks where secrets were revealed by snooping through emails of hacked accounts. The reasons vary from jealous spouses searching for proof of an assumed affair or as serious as corporate espionage in which certain parties are seeking essential information about a critical deal. Other attackers may use the compromised account to send social engineering messages to all contacts stored in the email account posing as the person whose account has been hacked.

Nowadays an email account is much more than just sending and receiving emails. Many free service providers like Microsoft or Google have various additional services attached to email accounts. Having access to these accounts means having access to such things...

Today Norman and the Shadowserver Foundation released a joint detailed report dubbed Operation Hangover, which relates to a recently released ESET blog about a targeted cyber/espionage attack that appears to be originating from India. Symantec released a brief blog around this incident last week and this Q&A will provide additional information relevant to Symantec around this group.

Q: Do Symantec and Norton products protect against threats used by this group?
Yes. Symantec confirms protection for attacks associated with Operation Hangover through our antivirus and IPS signatures, as well as STAR malware protection technologies...

ESET recently blogged about a targeted cyber/espionage attack that appears to be originating from India. Multiple security vendors have been tracking this campaign. The attack appears to be no more than four years old and very broad in scope. Based on our telemetry (Figure 1), it appears that attackers are focusing on targets located in Pakistan, specifically government agencies.

Figure. Telemetry data focused on South Asia

The identified infection vector of this campaign is spear phishing emails with malicious files attached. We’ve observed malicious documents exploiting the Microsoft Windows Common Controls ActiveX Control Remote Code...

Since the beginning of the year, a Japanese one-click fraud campaign has continued to wreak havoc on Google Play. The scammers have published approximately 700 apps in total since the end of January. The apps are published on a daily basis and the scammers have invested around US$4,000 in order to pay the US$25 developer fee to publish apps on Google Play.

Figure 1. Total number of developers and apps developed

Dealing with the fraudulent apps has really become a game of cat and mouse. Once the apps are removed from Google Play, the scammers simply publish more under new developer accounts. These are again removed shortly afterwards, but the scammers simply continue to publish more. Most of the apps are removed on the date of publication,...