Sometimes in this job you can be a kill joy. Take, for instance, a situation I was involved in a couple of weeks ago. I had the unpleasant task of informing someone that they were not going to be given 12 million dollars.
I had been invited on the morning show at KSON-FM in San Diego. One of the DJs had received an email he wanted to ask me about. I assumed it was a phishing attack, or perhaps the recent IRS scam that Kelly Conley has blogged about. It turned out he had received an email telling him he was going to be given 12 million dollars. I had to ruin his day. He was not going to be rich, and if he wasn’t careful he might become a victim of the old Spanish Prisoner scam.
This con has been around since the 16th century. 500 years ago you would have received a letter from a man held in a Spanish prison. The...
Today, April 14th, 2008, Symantec Security Response received reports from a number of our customers regarding a possible targeted spam attack against several Japanese companies.
The spam email associated with this attack spoofs itself as an email from a Japanese government agency and entices the user to open the attached .zip file to check recent organizational changes. The attached .zip file contains 2 files: 0414.xls and 0414.exe. 0414.xls is a legitimate file containing a list of names, addresses, and personnel positions that may or may not really exist. There is no evidence to suggest that any exploit attempts are made on this file.
However, the other file, 0414.exe, is a variant of Backdoor.Darkmoon, which has a keylogging capabilities. At the time of writing, we have seen several variants of...
The April State of Spam Report is out today and its findings show that spam levels bounced even higher, averaging 81 percent of all email in March and peaking at all-time highs of nearly 88 percent. “Bounce” being the operative word, because the new report highlights a marked increase in bounced message spam observed by Symantec. With these particular attacks in March, spammers took advantage of mail transfer agent (MTA) programs by utilizing the practice of backscatter to bounce massive volumes of emails to unsuspecting end users. The majority of the bounces observed were Russian language messages, containing images and text that change regularly, often a few times per day.
Spammers take advantage of MTA programs, which can be configured to send back not only a list of failed recipient addresses and an explanation why each address failed, but also a copy of the original message in its entirety. This practice allows spammers to bounce messages around the Internet,...
