Security Response

Troy Hunt, a Microsoft MVP, has done some terrific analysis of the passwords people use. Unfortunately, what has made this possible is the recent trend in hacktivism whereby it is common for hackivists to post the spoils of their attacks online to generate publicity and shame the company being attacked. While this has been bad news for the companies and their customers, it has provided a rich data set for researchers to analyze. The results from Troy’s research are pretty interesting. Rather than rehash the results here, I’ll let you read them yourself: www.troyhunt.com/2011/06/brief-sony-password-analysis.html

What struck me while reading the blog is how much we know about what kind of passwords people create and how little we’ve been able to make practical use of any of this knowledge. Sure we all run off and write blogs about how people need to make their passwords harder to...

There is no doubt that athletes all around the world are training hard to compete at the London Olympics in 2012, but cyber criminals seem to be gearing up for the event as well. Even with over 400 days still to go until the Olympics, we have already started seeing search terms related to this event returning a large number of poisoned links. As we have observed with search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning in the past, these poisoned links redirect to rogue antivirus sites.

The following are the top 10 poisoned search terms:

We have also found dozens of other poisoned search terms related to Olympics tickets, mascots, offers, and so on. Below is a screenshot of the search results for the term “london 2012 stadium diagram”; Norton Safe Web indicates that all of the first 10 links are malicious:

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At first, I was just plain annoyed. Someone forwarded a hoax email to me twice in the same week. I am often asked about hoax email: “Kevin, you work at Symantec, is this true?” That’s fine; that’s not what annoyed me. What set me off was that both emails had been forwarded to warn me. The forwarder wasn’t even questioning the content of the email. They had accepted clearly bogus warnings about the “world’s worst virus” as fact.
 
Then I started thinking about the Twitter discussion I recently had about education. Some security professionals are turned off by education because they don’t believe it works. The rest feel it’s important, but never done right. (I fall into the latter category.) And, I decided that my previous approach to educating people about these hoaxes was not working. Just giving people a link to a Web page...

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 "...