Security Response

Nothing can be more enticing than to be chosen for some free goodies—be it mementos, a cash prize, or a ticket to watch a game. It gets even more interesting if you are from a cricket crazy continent and suddenly, out of the blue, you receive an email saying that you are “the chosen one”!

What would you do? At first thought you would pounce on the opportunity, like a jungle tiger does its prey. But hang on a second! What you might be thinking is an opportunity of a lifetime, sadly, is just the opposite. Let me put it bluntly: if you have received such an email, you are "the chosen prey”. And if you decide to reply to it, then you could be in for some big trouble!

Millions of people get scammed every day with such fantastic offers. The sad part of the story is that many get plundered in this game. Scammers put in a lot of planning before sending out such emails. Upcoming events are focused upon, strategies are formalized, and...

Spammers have used scare tactics in the past, notably during the swine flu outbreak in 2009. A similar spam campaign using scare tactics was observed during the weeks leading up to April 1, 2010 as an expansion of the Conficker worm with the possibility of a major threat launch. Overall, scare attacks are meant to cause panic reactions among recipients who may, out of fear, click malicious links or download and install malicious code. Similar approaches have been observed recently, this time with a false epidemic alert. In this spam campaign trumpeting false epidemic news, spammers try to infuse fear in users and encourage them to read instructions to remain safe from infection.

Sample email subjects suggest there is an epidemic in nearly all countries in the world. However, in...

In the past few weeks, we have observed an old spam tactic re-emerging. Spammers are again using news feed to populate the subject header of spam messages. This technique has been used in the past in the form of directory harvesting attacks to gather valid email addresses. However, these attacks usually lasted for only one or two weeks, perhaps because their goal of collecting email addresses had served its purpose. This time not only the duration longer, but they have been selective in their news agency—it is only “BBC News” at this time.

Pharmacy-related spam is employing this technique, obviously attempting to get curious readers to open up these emails.  Using different techniques, like interesting news topics in a subject line, may compel users to open a spam email. This indirectly gives spammers a chance to advertise their products and possibly sell them too. In the case of...

When scammers try to gain sympathy from the email readers or to entice them with huge amount of money, they will usually mention a tragedy or, any event that attracted huge public attention. They may also want the users to read additional information, therefore a URL from a well-known news site is also provided. This addition of a link may assure a reader that the email is genuine, and some action needs to be taken in response to the email. Toward the end of the email scam, an appeal to help the victims is made if it is a tragic event. This message will also provide contact information in the form of email addresses, phone or fax numbers.

Anti spam filters will find it easier to block the news URLs in the scam message because, although they are legitimate, these are old news items and should ideally not be in circulation for any reason.

For the sake of curiosity, we went through our active filters to check such news URLs and surprisingly found some of the filters...