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:
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...
Recently we have had a resurgence of people complaining that their online email accounts have been compromised and are being used to send spam. The reports all say the same thing: a message has been sent to every recipient in the Webmail address book, but the user had nothing to do with sending it.
In these types of situations, it usually turns out that a user’s Webmail login credentials are stolen during a phishing attack. The attacker will then use the stolen credentials to change the user’s account settings in order to allow the Webmail account to automatically send out spam email. Also, the attacker will modify or add an email signature so that every future email sent by the user includes additional spam text that the user will be unaware of. In addition, auto-responding vacation notifications are often turned on so that an automatic reply—including spam—is sent to any new incoming email.
The added spam signature text usually contains an...
Malware is becoming increasingly complex. Take Rustock.B for example: this threat goes above and beyond to prevent analysis and detection. A blog article is probably too small of a space to describe everything Rustock does technically, but you shouldn’t be surprised, considering its complexity, that Rustock has a clear financial motive. In particular, apart from hiding itself with advanced rootkit techniques, the primary goal of this threat is to send a lot of spam. Because we capture spam such as this, it allows us to update our email security products, such as Brightmail AntiSpam. In addition to pharmaceuticals, mortgages, and imitation product spam, Rustock has also sent stock-based spam. Stock-based spam usually consists of some random text, followed by an image, followed by more random text. Below is an example of one of the...
