Some events familiar among people in the United States are commencing this month, including: Thanksgiving—a great occasion to thank dear friends and family for their kindness; and Black Friday—a day after Thanksgiving, usually the busiest retail shopping day of the year. Spam messages related to these events have begun flowing into the Symantec Probe Network. Many of the spam samples observed are encouraging users to take advantage of e-cards, clearance sales of cars and trucks, products bidding to get the best deals, replica watches. Clicking the URL will automatically redirect the user to a fake offer website.
 

Figure 1: An e-card for Thanksgiving...

It is more than a month until Christmas, but spammers are all set to spam the vacation season. We have observed Christmas related spam messages flowing into the Symantec Probe Network.

For greeting card spam, spammers used a legitimate look and feel in the email with headers (Subject & From) and flash animations that included a message to open the "Christmas Card.zip" attachment. After opening the attachment, the malicious code is downloaded on to the user's system. Symantec detects the attachment as W32/AutoRun.BBC!worm.
 

Figure 1. Christmas card example
 

As expected, spammers are promoting fake offers by targeting specific categories, including:

• Products
• Health
• Internet
• Finances
• Replicas

In a couple of days we will be celebrating Halloween. Some of us will be booking family trips, others will be preparing for themed parties with interesting costumes and fun games. To make it easy for their customers, various online companies offer goodies along with Halloween necessities. You might even receive emails from them regarding discounts and freebies. However, in a frenzy to get ready for this long awaited event, do not get carried away if suddenly you see an out of this world offer like the ones listed below.

While some organizations will offer reasonable discounts, others offer the sun and the moon in lieu of your purse or your personal details. Spammers have laid snares for unsuspecting Internet users ready to fall for these offers.

For example, you might decide to shop around for a new car this Halloween or you might want to do some last minute online purchases for your child. Spammers, keeping these needs in mind have already prepared an array of...

Contributor: Avdhoot Patil

Phishers have recently gained a lot of interest in football. After the scam on the 2014 FIFA World Cup, they have set their eyes on footballer Lionel Messi. In September 2012, Symantec observed the use of various social-networking themes in phishing. A number of these themes featured Lionel Messi. The phishing sites were hosted on free web-hosting sites.

In the first example, the background image of the phishing site was of Lionel Messi and the theme promoted football club Barcelona FC. On the other hand, the legitimate social-networking site in question does not provide users with any theme. End users were prompted to login in order to gain access to Messi’s social networking page. Of course, this is only a ploy and there is no gain for users from a phishing site. After the login credentials are entered, the phishing site redirected to the...