Contributor: Jeet Morparia

Online dating is big business. In 2012, 40 million people visited or used an online dating site in the United States. According to some statistics, the online dating industry is worth over $1 billion dollars. Others say it is worth over $3 billion globally. The fact is that online dating is a lucrative industry, so it should come as no surprise that it is also on the radar for cybercriminals.
 

Figure 1. Downloader.Ponik spam campaign world map
 

One of the most recent malicious spam campaigns we...

Contributor: Jeet Morparia

Over the last few weeks, there have been reports of various websites that have had their databases breached and customer data stolen by attackers through various means. A lot of the focus has been on how password dumps have been appearing online. There has always been the concern that attackers who obtain access to customer information would leverage the information in a malicious campaign.

A few days ago, MapleSoft, makers of mathematical and analytical software such as Maple, reported that they have been investigating a database breach. The breach resulted in the attackers obtaining customer information such as email addresses, first and last names, as well as company and institution names. MapleSoft states that no financial information was compromised in this breach.

Unlike previous database breaches, where password hashes were dumped onto the Web, the attackers in this breach decided to up the stakes. MapleSoft customers...

There was a recent report on the Opera forums that users were encountering strange certificate behavior when visiting particular services over secured network connections, specifically HTTPS. This occurred while using online banking, webmail services, and social networking sites. Upon further investigation, we discovered a Trojan was intercepting the HTTPS connections, namely Trojan.Tatanarg.B.

Trojan.Tatanarg.B works by installing a proxy in the browser to intercept HTTPS connections by providing its own self-signed certificate to users, in effect revealing all the encrypted traffic between the user and the secure service. The Trojan specifically targets Firefox,...

In 2011, dozens of Anonymous members who participated in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in support of Anonymous hacktivism causes were arrested. In these DDoS attacks, supporters using the Low Orbit Ion Cannon denial-of-service (DoS) tool would voluntarily include their computer in a botnet for attacks in support of Anonymous. In the wake Anonymous member arrests this week, it is worth highlighting how Anonymous supporters have been deceived into installing Zeus botnet clients purportedly for the purpose of DoS attacks. The Zeus client does perform DoS attacks, but it doesn’t stop there. It also steals the users' online banking credentials, webmail credentials, and cookies.

The deception of Anonymous supporters began on January 20, 2012, the day of the FBI Megaupload raid. An attacker took a popular PasteBin guide, used by Anonymous members for downloading...