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...

Yes, of course! This is what the email is all about! Or, is it?

The 2011 Wimbledon Championship has begun in full gusto and like any other major sporting event, we have been observing spam flowing in the wild that targets Wimbledon 2011. Spammers are exploiting the event by sending online betting, casino, and even online pharmacy spam through email.
The Italian spam sample given below mimics a legitimate betting website (the name of the betting site is deliberately omitted). The email headers are spoofed in an effort to bolster the legitimacy of the email; but the Sender domain has been registered only recently and shows hit-and-run spam characteristics. The spammer says, “Bet risk free! Even if you lose the bet, 20 Euros will be reimbursed.”

The spam sample given below explains the steps that users would supposedly need to take to acquire the “bonus”:

1. Sign up and make a deposit into your account.
2. Place your first...

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...

Malware authors move fast. Following on from the previous blog post on Bitcoin botnet mining, we have seen a recent Trojan in the wild targeting Bitcoin wallets. The Trojan is Infostealer.Coinbit and it has one motive: to locate your Bitcoin wallet.dat file and email it to the attacker. This is not surprising considering the potential values in a Bitcoin wallet. We have also discovered source code on underground forums which locates the wallet and, using FTP, uploads it to the attacker's servers.

 
Figure 1. Code snippet found on underground forums to steal Bitcoin data via...