Memorial Day is celebrated on May 27 and it is a day for memorializing the men and women who have died in military service for the United States. It is a common practice for cybercriminals to take advantage of events and holidays. This year, various spam messages related to Memorial Day have begun flowing into the Symantec Probe Network. We have observed that most of the spam samples encourage users to take advantage of clearance sales on cars and trucks. Clicking the URL will automatically redirect the user to a website containing some bogus offer.
 

Figure 1: Memorial Day financial spam
 

A variety of subject lines have been observed related to the clearance sale spam attacks for Memorial Day:

• Subject: Memorial Day Auto...

In the last few weeks we have observed a drastic increase in “penny stock” spam emails. In 2011 Symantec published a blog entitled Global Debt Crises News Drives Pump-and-Dump Stock Scams, which also dealt with this type of spam.

Penny stocks, also known as cent stocks, are shares in small companies that trade at low prices, often as low as a few cents per share. Penny stocks are a very popular topic used by spammers. The spam emails advertise the cheap shares and state that the company is on the verge of becoming very successful and that the value of the shares will rise significantly. The emails make out that the company is more valuable than it actually is and implies that they have just created some major product or are on the verge of a breakthrough and that the share value is tipped to rise dramatically. The aim is to increase sales of the stock,...

Contributor: Binny Kuriakose

People dream big when buying expensive items like a car or a property. When those dreams are seen with very affordable price tags it certainly attracts everybody’s interest. There are lots of websites available that allow people to post free classified advertisements online and one of the biggest categories is that of used cars. This is the new breeding ground for the old escrow tricksters.

This blog will discuss an interesting case of how a free classified advertisement and an escrow service turned out to be an online scam.
 

What are escrow services?

Escrow services are essentially mediators in trade that ensure all terms, agreed by both parties, are met. Escrow companies take the payment from the buyer and ‘hold it’ until the seller delivers the goods to the buyer and all the terms of sale are met. If you are buying an item from an unknown party without meeting face-...

Last week, Symantec posted a blog on an increase in spam messages with .pw URLs. Since then, spam messages with .pw URLs have begun showing up even more.
 

Figure 1. .pw TLD spam message increase
 

Symantec conducted some analysis into where these attacks are coming from in terms of IP spaces. As expected, Symantec observed a large quantity of mail being sent from an IP range and then moving to another IP range. While this is an expected behavior, there was an interesting twist. There were multiple companies (with different names) hosting .pw spammers using the same physical address in Nevada. 

Examining messages found in the Global Intelligence Network, Symantec...