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-...

Mother’s Day is celebrated in many countries on May 12 and it’s a day for children, regardless of age, to express their love to their mother by giving her a gift. Spam messages related to Mother’s Day have begun flowing into the Symantec Probe Network. Clicking the URL contained in the spam message automatically redirects the recipient to a website containing a bogus Mother’s Day offer upon completion of a fake survey.

Figure 1: Survey spam targeting Mother’s Day

Once the survey is completed, a page is then displayed asking the user to enter their personal information in order to receive the bogus offer.

Figure 2...

If you haven’t heard, Google Glass, the latest gadget from the Silicon Valley giant, has set the media and tech world abuzz, with both admiration and controversy surrounding the device. Google Glass was released to the public last week and combines smartphone technology with wearable glasses that is reminiscent of something seen on Star Trek. Public, in this case, actually means beta testers (called Glass Explorers) who had to apply for the chance to purchase the spectacles in advance by writing a 50 word essay using the hashtag, #ifihadglass. Those chosen had the opportunity to purchase the device for $1,500 USD.

Along with the admiration of a device that appears to do everything, comes controversy.  The 8,000 individuals who were able to purchase the device were bound to a restrictive end user license agreement, in which the product would be deactivated and rendered...

For that past several days, Symantec has observed an increase in spam messages containing hexadecimal obfuscated URLs. Hexadecimal character codes are simply the hexadecimal number to letter representation for the ASCII character set. To a computer, hexadecimal is just one out of the many systems for address expressions on the Internet.

The following samples are different hexadecimal representations for http://www.symantec.com.

Hexadecimal only:

http://www.

symantec.co&#x006d

Hexadecimal and ASCII characters:   

(“http” and “com” are in ASCII characters and the...