Last month we wrote about a spam campaign for mobile spying software (possible malware) that snoops on the phone calls and SMS messages of a person of interest. The most advertised service was spying on your loved one to see if they are having an affair. Of course, spying is not going to help a troubled relationship, so spammers are now providing another solution for distressed lovers. They claim to bring excellent results for solving troubles with loved ones—all without even needing to meet the spammer.
This is another ploy to entice recipients to contact the spammer, reminiscent of the examples in one of our May 2009 blog postings. In the current scenario, a clever message has been drafted to lure troubled lovers into a 419-like trap in order to extract personal information. Also, spammers may use personal...
In our earlier blog posting on obfuscated URL attacks we reported on the transition of image spam attacks to URL-obfuscation attacks, and we also mentioned how resources such as domains and subject lines were being recycled. In this blog post we will be discussing another aspect of the image spam attack, that of message size. We have observed a sudden growth in message sizes during the month of August. Similar jumps in message size were reported on the Symantec Security Response Blogs in November 2008.
After monitoring the messages during the month of August (so far), we came to the following conclusions:
• 9.3% of image spam had a message size greater than 100kb.
• 14.43 % of image spam had an average size of...
In the past, we have seen spammers use election content in their spam campaigns. So, it comes as no surprise to see spam messages with a catchy subject relating to an upcoming political event. We have observed spammers sending out messages instructing recipients on how to “make money fast” with a subject line referring to the upcoming Lower House election in Japan, which will be held on Aug 30, 2009.
A message guides users to a website where it is said that they can obtain free information on how to make money fast with summer horse racing. However, after a recipient enters their email address for registration they will not receive profitable information but instead a message that has a link for a definitive registration to provide personal information. It is unknown whether the recipients will receive free information after providing their personal data.
Although there is no correlation between an election and summer horse racing, spammers lure people to...
Happy Valentine’s Day! Yes, Chinese love birds get to celebrate twice a year with their loved ones. Chinese Valentine’s Day is set to fall this year on July 7th in the lunar calendar—that’s August 26 on the western calendar.
Chinese spammers have been using eventful holidays in the same way that English and European spammers have in order to spread their wares. We have observed spammers sending dating service advertisements and gift service site promotions for the upcoming Chinese holiday. Below you will find some examples of recent Chinese Valentine spam messages.
Sample 1:
Chinese singles often go to the matchmaker temple and pray for luck in love or marriage. People call this matchmaker god “Yue Lao.” We see spammers using this name in email aliases to promote their dating service for this legendary holiday. The advertisement is simply an inserted dating service...
Spammers continue to take advantage of the Internet tools and applications Google provides for free. In the past we have encountered spammers abusing Google Group Pages, Google Maps, Google Search, and Google Docs to host spam content. Recently spammers have started using Google Translate. Google Translate is an excellent tool that enables users to translate any text, Web page, or document, and convert the native text to the specified language requested.
With recent medication spam offer attacks, spammers have discovered a way to exploit the use of Google Translate. Here is one example:
Hijacked URL directory space from a legit domain. In this example they used www.ipanel.tv with the directory path www.ipanel.tv/images/news/news.htm to use as a redirect to host the intended spam domain...
In my previous post, I covered Waledac’s bootstrap mechanisms, armoring methods, and some parts of its communication protocol. Today, I will continue to discuss its communication protocol and how it implements its main functionalities through command-and-control (C&C) messages. I will describe its various tasks and commands, how it downloads components or updates, how it constructs its spam, and lastly how it acts as an infostealer.
Types of task messages
As I mentioned last time, W32.Waledac currently uses nine types of task messages. These messages are mainly used by the malware to distribute spam templates or word lists for its spam campaigns, to send reports,...
Recently, Twitter implemented technology to help stem the threat of malicious URLs being propagated though its service. This approach seems to be a great effort on the part of Twitter to prevent attackers from tweeting malicious links.
It appears as if the tool is filtering tweets and comparing any embedded URL to their list of known malicious sites. Trying to determine whether a URL points to a malicious website in a large-scale automated fashion, especially in today’s threat landscape, is a challenging problem. From my perspective, there are a few issues that need to be worked out. Twitter is likely in the nascent stages of addressing these types of issues and we expect they will try to overcome the associated limitations.
To date we've only seen a relatively small number of attack attempts involving malicious URLs on Twitter. URL-shortening services are often at the heart of these types of attacks as bad guys try to take advantage of the system to disguise...
The fraudsters are constantly coming up with innovative ways to deceive innocent users of the Internet. Symantec recently observed an increase in phishing attacks facilitated by spam email messages that are targeted towards a popular email client application. The spam message requests the intended victims to re-configure the email client application by clicking on the link provided in the email. The phishing spam messages previously in circulation had a malicious file attached as a setup for the bogus update.
The recent spam email messages, in an attempt to make appear legitimate, also provide a contact number for any queries regarding the update:
“If you have received this message in error, please notify us immediately by calling (310) xxx-6428 and destroy the related message.”
Recently, we reported how HTML attachments were being used in various spam campaigns such as phishing attacks, email harvesting attacks, and 419 scams. Spammers have included a few more file formats, again in an attempt to escape anti-spam filters. As experienced previously with HTML attachments, these new file formats are also getting used in several different spam categories.
In the first example, we discuss the MHT file format attached with phishing emails. When a Web page is saved as a Web archive in Internet Explorer, it gets saved to a Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension HTML format with an MHT extension. Further information can be found here. An attached MHT file works similar to an HTML file and opens a legitimate-looking Web page. This Web page looks exactly like a legitimate bank page, asking for critical financial...
Players and sports fans around the globe are already warming up for some of the major tournaments like EPL, Champions League, and the MLB World Series. Various national soccer leagues across Europe, including the famous EPL and Champions League, are kicking off in August. In the United States, baseball fans are eagerly waiting for the MLB World Series, which is scheduled in October.
During this season spammers are racing to reach millions of mailboxes with fake product promotions and fraudulent content. Recently we’ve come across product offer spam linked to the upcoming busy sports season.
In this particular scam message, spammers are seeking football players’ profiles. Below is an example of a scam message along with headers:
This is not the first time we have monitored scam messages targeting football players. Spammers employ these old...
Have you received email messages in the last several weeks with several random words in the subject line, and a random sentence in the message body? If your answer is yes, then you are one of the victims of the ongoing directory harvesting attack (DHA) by spammers.
The purpose of a DHA is to find valid email addresses on a domain for future spam attacks. During a DHA attack, any addresses for which the recipient’s email server accepts email are considered valid and will be added to the spammer’s address database to include in future spam attacks.
The traditional Chinese Father’s Day is set on August 8—coming from “8/8”, which is pronounced “Pa-Pa” in Chinese. Spammers are offering us a wide array of gift selections, including high tech products, luxury wallets and watches for our hard working dads.
Spammers have a detailed catalog of items and are giving potential buyers a one-year warranty on replica products. They are also offering a special promotion, giving a first time buyer discount on a mass-mailing service.
In the sample below, the spammer claims they are a legitimate shopping site for luxury items:
In recent months, we have observed different types of legitimate newsletter templates used in pharmacy spam attacks. In order to get users to open these email messages, spammers need to ensure that the subject line (entry point) is always enticing and that the content looks legitimate. So much so that a user may open these emails right away without confirming the sender information.
We start with "discount special" subject lines. These lines are constructed using different combinations of words such as pharmacy, men, health, dear, and sale. These words are usually followed with some discount value (always more than 70 percent). The latest inclusion to the list is one that ends with a country name such as United States, Bulgaria, or Columbia. We have provided some examples of subject lines made with these words (the positions of the words change):
Dear [email address] [date and time with time zone] 80% 0FF on [pharmaceutical company].
RE: Pharmacy...
Based on the lack of coverage in recent weeks, some people may think that the swine flu epidemic has slowed down for a while. However, there have been many reports of deaths caused by swine flu in different countries around the world in the past couple of weeks. The general public is continuing to monitor news of this disease very closely.
Spammers have been swiftly capitalizing on the fear of a pandemic in the fraudulent email they have been sending. We observed spam disguised as if it was sent from a public health agency or media outlet. The spammers are sending viruses embedded in links in the message body, such as in the example below. Users are redirected to the file “information.PDF.exe” if they are enticed to attempt the download of the image. Symantec has detected information.PDF.exe as Downloader.
We’ve observed spam disguised as a legitimate Taiwanese commercial bank sending out credit card promotion email messages that are embedded with an .swf virus link. In this particular attack, recipients are able to see the bank’s image at the top of the email message and promotion notes at the bottom. There is also a large blank space within the promotion message that is designed to make you believe that the credit card promotion content has been lost in transit. Recipients are then instructed to click on the link in case of page display error issues.
This attack is found to be a dictionary/domain attack. Symantec detects the “blog.html” link in the spam email as Trojan.Malscript!html. The blog.html link contains shellcode in the form of a file named sploit.swf, which exploits Adobe AVM2 Scope Stack Corruption Vulnerability (...
