February is a short month, but not too short for spam events to make an impact. Valentine's Day and its associated threats has passed, so now it is time for International Women's Day—celebrated on March 8 every year. This is a great occasion to express love, respect, and kindness toward women and spammers will always attempt to take advantage of these events. The following is a spam campaign we have observed targeting International Women’s Day with a fake product promotion.

Often, spam originating from Russia will attack targets using online marketing promotions with odd phone numbers. Here, spammers targeted users by providing fake offers for great gifts for Valentine’s and International Women’s Day and also some peculiar phone numbers are provided for ordering a gift certificate.

The following is an example of the Russian spam observed by...

Regular readers of the Symantec blog may sometimes read blogs that mention a fraudulent file that is signed with a valid digital certificate or that an attacker signed their malware with a stolen digital certificate.

You may recall that the creators of Stuxnet, arguably the most notorious malware in history, signed it using the private keys of valid digital certificates of well-known companies.

Digital certificates are significant because a file with a digital certificate can be checked to see who authored it and to make sure it was not altered. Moreover, some versions of Windows display a dialog box when a file that has no digital signature is opened. If an attacker signs malware with the stolen private key from a digital certificate, Windows will execute the file in many cases, except if the file is downloaded from the Internet using a Web browser.

How does an...

Today Mandiant released a detailed report dubbed "APT1" which focuses on a prolific cyber espionage campaign by the Comment Crew going back to at least 2006 and targeting a broad range of industries. The report cites the earliest known public reference about APT1 infrastructure as originating from Symantec. We have detected this threat as Backdoor.Wualess since 2006 and have been actively tracking the group behind these attacks. The following Q&A briefly outlines some of the relevant Symantec information around this group:

Q: Do Symantec and Norton products protect against threats used by this group?

Yes. Symantec confirms protection for attacks associated with the Comment Crew through our antivirus and IPS signatures, as well as STAR malware...

Spanish police have reported the arrest of an individual involved with a particular strain of police Ransomware known as Ransom.EY, detected by Symantec as Trojan.Ransomgerpo.

This variant is one of the earliest active police Ransomware families, which Symantec has been tracking since at least July, 2011. The Trojan was distributed using drive by download techniques, in conjunction with the Black Hole exploit kit. Early versions of the locking screen were quite primitive but quickly evolved as the author obviously stole design ideas from other Ransomware gangs as shown in Figure 1.

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