Security Response

As most all of us will know, the United States’ Independence Day is on the fourth of July, which is only a few days away. Independence Day is commonly associated with fireworks, parades, barbecues, fairs, ceremonies, get togethers, and various other public and private events celebrating the national holiday. Many people also utilize this time for vacation trips, especially if it’s a long July 4th weekend. However, not everyone goes out of town or participates in special events. Some people actually take advantage of the nice holiday weekend to stay at home and catch up on other activities, which may include shopping. Since sales levels are usually lower during holiday weekends, stores and online shopping sites offer lots of exciting deals. In any case, today’s technology makes it possible to shop online from anywhere—even while on a beach vacation, say!

The spammers, as always, have exploited this likelihood and are distributing spam messages...

Spam messages promoting pharmaceutical products have been perhaps the most commonly seen spam attacks over the past several years. Pharmaceutical products are deceptively marketed through spam emails employing a variety of obfuscation techniques. Symantec recently observed a pharmaceutical spam campaign abusing the YouTube brand. Similar spam campaigns abusing popular brands have been seen in the past, however, the email volume observed in this particular spam attack has been immense.

Sample From and Subject lines observed in this spam attack are below.

From: YouTube Service <service@youtube.com>

Subject: YouTube Administration sent you a message: Your video on the TOP of YouTube

Subject: YouTube Service sent you a message: Best Unrated Videos To Watch

Subject: YouTube Support sent you a message: Your video has been removed due to terms of use violation

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As we have seen with many major events in the past, news of the British Royal Wedding is currently being used by cyber criminals to bolster their spam campaigns and push rogue antivirus software through black hat search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.
 

Spam campaigns

We have blogged previously about “snowshoe” spammers targeting the upcoming British Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Spam email messages advertising a replica of Princess Diana’s engagement ring that were observed in February are still making the rounds on the Internet, and the eve of the royal wedding is now upon us. Furthermore, as we had anticipated, we have recently observed additional spam campaigns making use of this significant event to promote various products.

In one such recent spam campaign, email promoting a "...

Symantec has blogged previously about spammers exploiting the recent catastrophic situation in Japan. Since then, Symantec has observed additional variations in spam attacks in which the spammers are continuing to exploit the tragedy, even as the earthquake and tsunami relief efforts are in progress. Similar to what we have seen in the past, virus attacks in the form of messages containing links to images in the message body were observed in the third week of March. Such attacks, along with scam emails, are usually prevalent after such disasters have occurred. The subject line and screenshot of a sample message body of the virus attack can be seen below.

Subject: Novo tsunami atinge Sendai e Japao declara estado de emergencia em usina nuclear
[Subject: New tsunami hits Japan Sendai and declares state of emergency in nuclear plant]

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