Beginning on New Year's Eve, January 1, 2012 and continuing earlier into the days following, Symantec Intelligence identified spammers taking advantage of the New Year anniversary, seemingly to entice users into clicking on spam links contained in the email messages.

Further investigation revealed that spammers were compromising legitimate Web servers, leaving the main Web site content intact (to avoid or delay detection) and simply adding a simple PHP script, typically named "HappyNewYear.php", "new-year-link.php" or "new-year.link.php". These scripts simply redirect to a spam pharmaceutical Web site.

Analysis of one of the messages we saw using these links makes the spammers' motives clearer, as can be seen in figure 1, below.

Figure 1: Example spam email containing New Year reference in spam URL

The message uses social...

Global spam is now at the lowest it has been since November 2008, when the rogue ISP McColo was closed-down. The effect on spam volumes back then were very dramatic and spam accounted for 68.0% of global emails. More recently the decline has been much slower, but spammers have also adapted to using more targeted approaches and exploiting social media as alternatives to email. Moreover, pharmaceutical spam is now at the lowest it has been since we started tracking it, accounting for 35.5% of spam, compared with 64.2% at the end of 2010.

With targeted attacks and advanced persistent threats being very much in the news this year, we thought it would be a good time as the end of the year draws closer to begin our review of targeted attacks and look more closely at what has been described as “advanced persistent threats” or APTs for short. Terms such as APT have been overused and sometimes misused by the media, but APTs are a real threat to some companies and...

Some of the newest printers have scan-to-email ability, a feature that allows users to email scanned documents to a specified email address on demand. Symantec Intelligence has identified malware authors using social engineering tactics that take advantage of this, sending executables in a compressed “.zip” archive via email. The attachment contains an executable disguised as a scanned document from a printer, as shown in the example in figure 1, below.
 

Figure 1: Example of malicious email masquerading as a scanned document sent from an office printer

In each case the sender domain was spoofed to match the recipient domain, sometimes appearing as though forwarded to the recipient by a colleague at the same organization, implying that this email originated internally.
To be clear, office printers and scanners will not send malware-laden...

The word ‘Nimda’ may not be the most well remembered in the cyber-crime hall of fame but as malicious worm outbreaks go, Nimda certainly contributed to the malware landscape and was able to cause havoc on 18 September, 10 years ago in 2001.

Long before cloud based security services were the norm and virus scanning was only performed once a week, the Nimda worm was effectively unleashed onto the global computer network exactly a week after the 9/11 atrocities. Because of this timing, some media quickly began speculating a link between the worm and Al Qaeda, although this rumour was quickly quashed by the FBI, but it did highlight the fact that cyber warfare can be a real threat carefully orchestrated by sophisticated cyber gangs or even terrorists and not script kiddies tucked away in dormitories.

The Nimda worm came hot on the heels of the “Code Red” scare in August 2001, when a variant of the original worm infected more than 250,000 machines...