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...
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:
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...
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...
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,...
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...
When we analyzed spam data from the past few years, we observed that holiday seasons spirit up malware spam campaigns using e-cards, video player downloads or ActiveX download attacks. We have found that greeting card or e-card spam are the most common. Due to this reason spammers are employing this technique in other spam campaigns.
When analyzing spam messages from the Symantec Probe Network, we came across an interesting phishing attack where spammers are misrepresenting e-card services.
In this unique phishing attack, a URL for the animated e-card is provided in the message. When the user clicks on this link, an animated video is played in a flash player. Surprisingly, the personal message section is invaded by a typical phishing message.
The greeting card message is shown in the image below:
Scammers based in Nigeria have long been known for using legitimate email formats for spreading infamously fraudulent 419 messages. We have already monitored e-card services, social networking invites, and various other services provided on social networking sites. Yet another example is a calendar service being abused for sending scam messages.
Sadly there is an addition to this list, where the “send link to friend” service is exploited for sending scam messages. Many news websites provide an option to send news links to another person. A text area is also provided to write personalized messages. It is a general tendency of netizens to share important news with friends by forwarding the links along with their comments on the news. In a recent spam attack we monitored a typical 419 scam message injected into the text area of a news article. With this, scammers smartly introduce a scam message in an otherwise very legitimate looking mail.
October 2009 saw spam volumes averaging at 87 percent of all email messages, which is consistent with spam volumes observed in August and September 2009, but 10.6% higher than October 2008.
A notable highlight this month is the growth of spam originating from APJ (23% increase of 6% since June 2009) and South America (22% increase of 5% since June 2009) with a corresponding decline in spam originating from EMEA (28% decrease of 6% since June 2009) and North America (20% decrease of 5% since June 2009). This change can be attributed to a number of factors, including spam levels increasing; distribution networks becoming more dynamic as additional broadband connected targets are coming online every day; botnets continuing to jockey for position; and countries such as India, Taiwan, Thailand, and Chile becoming more visible as regions of origin for spam.
With respect to spam categories, Internet spam increased by 7% and now accounts for 39% of all spam messages. This...
Recently, I've been seeing phishing attacks using Web forms attached to emails making the rounds again. This type of phishing isn't so common but is used on occasion, so I want to take this opportunity to remind everyone not to fall for this trick.
Common phishing attacks include emails purporting to be from legitimate entities like financial instituions, auction sites, and SNS sites which include links to Web sites set up by the attacker to steal user information.
In this case, however, the phishing site arrives as an email attachment rather than a link to the site included in the body of the email.
Symantec has always recommended that personal information, especially financial information such as Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, and of course your email address must not be revealed anywhere on the Internet. Many security experts also believe that disclosing an IP address to an unknown person on the Internet is equally dangerous. We also now need to be cautious of not divulging our mobile numbers or date of birth because these bytes of information are also vitally essential, and are considered part of your identity by financial institutions.
We are monitoring a new wave of phishing attacks that is attempting to extract information such as the mobile numbers and/or dates of birth of recipients by using false alerts:
A couple of the Subject lines of these alerts are:
Symantec recently reported a malicious spam campaign against Facebook, which is now accompanied by a phishing attack. These messages look like an official Facebook invite or password reset confirmation mail.
If we place the cursor over the update button in the message, we can actually see the phishing URL in the status bar. If a user clicks on the “Update” button, he or she is redirected to a Facebook look-alike phishing site. Here, users are asked to enter a password to complete the update procedure. Unfortunately, the user’s password will be stolen if they try to log in on this page.
These attacks can be identified by the subject lines listed below:
Facebook account update
New login system
Facebook Update tool
While looking through some recent customer submissions a particular filename caught my attention. It was called “googlewaveinvitegenerator.exe”. Google Wave is a new communication application being developed by Google. Many people who missed the initial sign up for this application are now seeking invites to the service. Certain bad guys have latched onto this and are attempting to take advantage of the situation to push malware. In this case the malware in question is Backdoor.Tidserv. It’s also worth pointing out Google Wave was only selected because of its current popularity. Using a trusted brand like this also increases the chance of success for the attacker. This technique is something we see all of the time.
This particular campaign tries to trick people who want to get into the Google Wave community by promising not only an application that generates Google Wave invites, but also untold riches by selling these invites to other people who want to...
