We know that Facebook scammers can be very creative and that they are experimenting with new ways to achieve their goals. Besides the omnipresent malicious Facebook apps that will steal the user’s permissions to post to his or her wall, we currently see a rise in the number of manual script attacks, with a few hundred thousand users falling victim daily.

The user is lured with a message as bait to a prepared site. The all time favourite “See who viewed your profile” is used a lot these days, but we have seen others with free credits for social games and the like. This landing page could be a Facebook page, a Facebook application page, or a remote site on some domain. It asks the user to copy some simple looking Javascript to the browser address bar and to click the ‘Enter’ key.

The scammers want to ensure sure that the users are not strained by...

The first spam using the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death was seen in the wild within three hours of the event—Symantec reported this spam activity along with other spam samples in a blog entitled “Osama Dead” is No Longer a Hoax. As anticipated, we started observing a rise in malicious and phishing attacks.

Phishing attacks usually target big brands. In one such phishing attack capitalizing on Bin Laden news, spammers targeted CNN Mexico. The spam email contains a link to bogus “photos and uncensored videos” and redirects users to a phishing site:

The phishing site shows an auto-running Bin Laden related video in an iframe and asks the user to click on a link to download a “complete” video. Clicking on that link forces the download of an ....

On Tuesday, April 26, Symantec hosted a live Twitter chat centered around our latest Internet Security Threat Report and the changing threat landscape. We’d like to extend a big thank you to those who participated and joined the conversation.

 Using the #SecChat hash tag in Twitter, we were able to guide a lively discussion around what’s top of mind with regard to the current security threat landscape for those of you in the security industry.

One aspect of the discussion focused on end-user security education and its importance, while others questioned whether dollars spent toward user education made any difference at all. We certainly heard all sides to the story. If there is anything people agree on it’s that the “user is like water, following the path of least resistance to their end goal,” in the words of one tweeter.

Those in support...

On April 20, for the first time ever, gold rose above $1,500 an ounce as worries over the U.S. economic outlook boosted demand for the metal as a haven. Within hours, Symantec observed this spammer’s response: a hit-and-run spam attack with the Subject line “Subject: Is Gold Your Ticket To A Golden Future?”

Hit-and-run spam (or snow-shoe spam) is a threat known for its large volumes of spam messages in short bursts, where domains are quickly rotating and the sending IP hops within a certain /24 IP range.

Key characteristics include:

• The message is in HTML
• There is some type of word salad or word obfuscation injected between various tags and/or in the URL by means of multiple directories
• The message is typically sent within the same /24 IP range
• Domains are rotated quickly

The call to action for this particular attack is a URL in the message body which directs the recipient to a Web site where the...