It has come to our attention recently that a website is giving out instructions on how to use a low tech social engineering trick to view private Facebook profiles. To view the instructions, a third-party application must be first downloaded and installed. While this application is not malware, it may impact computer performance. The instructions then describe how to view private Facebook profiles, with the result being that a Facebook user may receive a friend request from a person that is already on their friend list.

The social engineering trick lies in the fact that the friend request is not from the “friend” that it purports to be from. The friend request may also come with a personal message; the instructions also suggest a message, “Hey, I can’t login to the previous account. add [sic] me back in.” Since the friend request received both via email and Facebook looks legitimate (because it is legitimate; that is, the...

Phishers are constantly targeting newer brands from diverse industries, with the sole motive of fraudulently acquiring a large amount of users’ confidential information for financial gains. Symantec has observed and followed up with some recent trends in phishing attacks targeting some of the popular online gaming websites. Since the beginning of this year there has been a steady rise in phishing attacks on gaming websites.

Why and How?

The primary motive of fraudsters is to seek out users’ confidential information, such as the login details for online gaming websites. The sample shown below is of a typical phishing Web page created by the fraudsters, which mimics a popular online gaming website. To trick users into trusting the phishing website, the phishers add a widget (to monitor online visitors) that will display some random number of purported online users visiting the site at a given time.  
       ...

A new exploit targeting Internet Explorer was published to the BugTraq mailing list yesterday. Symantec has conducted further tests and confirmed that it affects Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 as well. The exploit currently exhibits signs of poor reliability, but we expect that a fully-functional reliable exploit will be available in the near future.  When this happens, attackers will have the ability to insert the exploit into Web sites, infecting potential visitors.  For an attacker to launch a successful attack, they must lure victims to their malicious Web page or a Web site they have compromised. In both cases, the attack requires JavaScript to exploit Internet Explorer.

The exploit targets a vulnerability in the way Internet Explorer uses cascading style sheet (CSS) information. CSS is used in many Web pages to define...

Zeus is a botnet package that allows for the easy creation and command and control of a botnet.  We've discussed Zeus previously in Zeus, King of the Underground Crimeware Toolkits. The main purpose of Zeus is to steal online credentials such as online banking passwords, but it can be configured to steal passwords from any online site. 

Today, the BBC is reporting that police in the UK have arrested two suspects in relation to Zeus. While the details are preliminary, the two likely appear to be users of the Zeus botnet package rather than the actual creators, and thus the prevalence and usage of Zeus is likely to continue.

We've created a research paper providing more in-depth information on Zeus, including how the bot is created, what functionality it has, and additional screenshots on...