Recently, Symantec has observed an increase in .eu domains contained within pharmacy and dating spam messages. The spam emails observed so far are predominantly in the German language. The specific patterns and characteristics demonstrate that the attacks employ a "hit-and-run" technique.

In "hit-and-run" attacks, spammers quickly rotate through the IP addresses and domains that are being used. Unlike 80% of spam attacks, these messages are not sent from botnets of compromised computers, but from mail server IP addresses with a previously unknown reputation.

Recent data obtained from the Symantec Global Intelligence network shows that the number of spam emails that contain .eu domains increased slightly in the first and third week of June. Furthermore, the number of spam emails containing .eu domains written in the German language increased considerably in the last week of June.
 

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Co-contributor: Paul Thomas

Over the last few days, we have seen reports of an Android botnet hijacking mail clients on Android devices and sending spam promoting stocks, finance, and pharmaceuticals. While an Android botnet is a possible culprit, other scenarios are more likely—such as spam originating from compromised computers.

To begin, here is a sample of a spam email sent on July 3:

Sample subject lines may appear as:

• Wall Street SHOCK ahead!
• Leading Edge Market Analysis
• RE RE: Controlled Prescriptions
• Special Situation Report
• Fwd: Ground Breaking News Report

Two indicators suggest these spam messages originate from a hijacked Android mail client:

• Message includes the string "androidMobile" in...

Contributor: Anand Muralidharan

The 14th edition of the UEFA European Championship is set to begin from June 8th and will be hosted in Poland and Ukraine. Symantec has intercepted a 419 spam attack targeting EURO 2012. Below is a screenshot of the spam mail.

The scam message is attached as a PDF file called UEFA.pdf. This is a typical 419 scam message that says that the reader has won a EURO 2012 Cup promotion lottery. In the rest of the message, the spammers explain in detail how the recipient’s email address reached them and how it was selected as a winner out of huge number of other participants.

Finally, the recipient is asked to send the winning identification numbers by filling in the UEFA EURO 2012 online documentation form, which asks for personal details such as name, address, age, occupation, and phone...

For anti-spam software, it is quite easy to prevent spam by using content-based filters. So spammers come up with different obfuscation techniques to bypass URL-based filters such as inserting “shy characters”, as we have discussed previously. Recently, spammers have been trying to cash-in on the smallest of gaps that they could find in conventional anti-spam technologies. Spammers are now attempting to obfuscate the URLs in spam messages, either by inserting white space characters of varying sizes or by replacing the conventional “.” (dot) character by “。” (An ideographic full-stop, mostly used in Asian languages)

How did they do it? Let’s take a look at both of these techniques.

Using different size white space characters is allowed in HTML. All languages use spaces to separate words. However, the size of the white space characters...