The five-time Grammy award winner Amy Winehouse was found dead in London on July 23rd. Symantec has already observed spammers who are trying to capitalize on related news headlines by sending out malicious threats less than a day after the news was released.

The two samples given below are examples that we have observed. These Portuguese-language attacks use similar spam techniques. All samples are sent from randomized individual email accounts with various subject lines related to the celebrity’s death in an attempt to lure interested readers to open a malicious URL. Immediately after the link is clicked, a pop-up window is shown, which asks users to download a file that is loosely disguised as an image or video file, for example (anything other than an executable).

The file is given a name that is related to the celebrity, and of course isn’t an image or video file, but a malicious binary. Symantec has detected the threats in these samples as...

Apple's MobileMe is a collection of online services and software. Among its various services is a file-hosting service called iDisk. Recently, Symantec has recorded phishing sites that spoofed iDisk’s Web page. The phishing sites were hosted on a free Web-hosting site.

So, what’s in this service that interests phishers? The service is based on a paid subscription, with which files of up to 20 GB can be uploaded and shared. Phishers are looking to gain access to this service for free. This is an example of a phishing attack targeting user information for reasons other than financial gain.

The phishing site prompts the user to enter their password for logging in. (In this case, the user ID was already populated on the phishing page.) After the password is entered, the page redirects to the legitimate Web page of Apple MobileMe with an error message for an invalid...

We have recently observed a run of spam that is trying to capitalize on the new social networking platform provided by Google, named Google+. The spam samples are similar to other social network spam messages, which are discussed in one of our previous blogs. Currently, Google is trialing their new venture with limited users; therefore, participation is by invitation only. Hence, it is expected that we’ll see bogus Google+ invites distributed as spam in the wild.

The message in this latest spam campaign looks like a legitimate invite from an already registered user, and it provides an invitation link. However, if one takes even a cursory glance at the URL in the status bar, it shows that the link doesn’t relate to Google in any way.
The headers in the spam samples are as follows:

Subject: Welcome to the Google+ project
From: [removed] (Google+) <[removed...

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...