As we have blogged in the past, Zeus (Trojan.Zbot) and other banking Trojans have been a headache to online banking customers all over the world for years. Certain countries such as Japan have in the past escaped attacks from banking Trojans, perhaps due to the language barrier or some other unknown reason. As the National Police Agency of Japan has reported several times, Japanese online banking customers have now started to fall victim to this type of attack.

Symantec recently came across a new Zeus file targeting five major banks in Japan. Figure 1 shows part of the decrypted configuration file. The...

Contributor: John Harrison

Symantec has been tracking a large malvertising campaign for over 5 months now. The campaign is still active and uses Dynamic Domain Name System (DDNS) to prevent itself from being tracked.

The campaign spread rapidly and compromised popular domains and  adult websites. High profile domains with an Alexa ranking of 5,000 or under have also been compromised. Some compromised websites were cleaned after notice from Symantec products alerted users when the sites were visited. However, many of the domains remain compromised.

The interesting thing about infections delivered through malvertising is that it does not require any user action (like clicking) to compromise the system and it does not exploit any vulnerabilities on the website or the server it is hosted from. Infections delivered through malvertising silently travel through Web page advertisements served by...

Most people are eagerly waiting for Valentine's Day. The day is an opportunity to spread affection and excitement amongst loved ones by exchanging gifts. Last year we observed prominent spam attacks using Valentine’s Day as bait. Messages promoted unbelievably discounted jewelry, dinning opportunities, and expensive gifts.

This year, various Valentine’s Day spam messages have started flowing through Symantec’s Probe Network. The top word combinations used in spam messages include the following:

• Find-Your-Valentine
• eCards-for-Valentine
• Valentine’s-Day-Flowers

The e-card spam message, shown in Figure 1, arrives with a malicious attachment called ValentineCard4you.zip. After opening the attachment, malware is downloaded on to the user's computer. Symantec detects the attachment as...

Last week, Twitter announced that the details of around 250,000 of its users may have been compromised before it discovered and stopped an attack on their network. There is not much you can do when attackers go straight to the service provider to try to steal your data; however, it is also common for attackers to approach the end-user in order to obtain account details. Phishing is a popular tactic used to steal account details this way. When thinking of phishing attacks, people usually think of bank account or credit card details as the type of information that is stolen but social network account details are also a popular commodity for attackers.

Attackers see phishing on social network sites as an easy way to trick users into giving their credentials away. So let me take this opportunity to go over one particular attack that has been taking place on Twitter over the last few months and show you...