Today we are pleased to announce the successful takedown of the Bamital botnet. Symantec has been tracking this botnet since late 2009 and recently partnered with Microsoft to identify and shut down all known components vital to the botnet's operation.

Bamital is a malware family whose primary purpose is to hijack search engine results, redirecting clicks on these results to an attacker controlled command-and-control (C&C) server. The C&C server redirects these search results to websites of the attackers' choosing. Bamital also has the ability to click on advertisements without user interaction. This results in poor user experience when using search engines along with an increased risk of further malware infections.

Bamital’s origin can be tracked back to late 2009 and has evolved through multiple variations over the past couple of years. Bamital has...

Symantec Security Response is aware that fake FedEx emails have been circulating recently. The emails claim the user must print out a receipt by clicking on a link and then physically go to the nearest FedEx office to receive their parcel. Obviously the parcel does not exist and those who click on the link will be greeted by a PostalReceipt.zip file containing malicious PostalReceipt.exe executable file. Instead of receiving a parcel, which the user did not order in the first place, Trojan.Smoaler is delivered to the computer.

All the fake FedEx emails delivering this malware are almost identical except for the order numbers and the website the zip file is hosted on. One sign of laziness, or perhaps an oversight on the part of the malware author, is an consistent order date. The author does change the domain where Trojan.Smoaler is hosted daily. The following emails were spammed out...

It is important for malware authors to keep a solid network connection between their malware on compromised computers and their own servers so that the malware can receive commands and be updated. However, communication between the malware and the malware servers may be filtered by a gateway or local firewall, or blocked by an intrusion prevention system (IPS). Consequently, malware authors try to find more secure methods of providing communication between the malware and the servers. For example, I wrote a blog last November detailing how Backdoor.Makadocs uses the Google docs viewer function as a proxy to maintain a solid connection between the malware and its servers. More recently, I discovered a Trojan horse that uses Sender...

Contributor: Lionel Payet

Last week we saw how W32.Waledac was getting cozy with W32.Virut, but let us not forget about other spam botnets, like Trojan.Pandex (a.k.a. Cutwail), as they also persist in their propagation affairs.

The people behind W32.Cridex have used many attack vectors to spread the malware, including taking advantage of exploit kits like Blackhole, or attempting to deceive users with crafted PDF documents. This month they have managed to compose a more elaborate attack.

The attackers have...