Posted on behalf of Dan Bleaken, Malware Data Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services

MP3 Spam Returns to Attract Recipients to Canadian Pharmacy Website

I remember the excitement in the MessageLabs anti-spam team when the first spam with an MP3 file was intercepted, back on 18 October 2007.  At that time we were watching particularly carefully for the appearance of new file types in spam.  Image spam had been huge over the Summer of 2007, especially images containing randomised pixels (an attempt to bypass traditional signature-based detection).  Later in the same year, PDF files were also being used as well as some other file types that hadn’t been seen in spam before.  At that time it seemed as though spammers were keen to explore the use of new attachment types; anything to keep their spam runs varied and shifting. 

Today of course, we still see various file formats being used in spam messages, but not nearly...

This post is made on behalf of my colleague Mat Nisbet, Malware Analyst for Symantec Hosted Services.

As of November 18, we have noticed a huge jump in the number of spam e-mails that contain a link to Twitter. Normally there is a tiny fraction of a percent, but on November 18 it jumped to 4 percent of all spam. This new surge is entirely from the DonBot botnet.

The apparent aim of these e-mails is to get people to fall for “get rich by working at home” schemes where the victim is encouraged to pay an initial fee for a trial and then sit back and watch the cash come in. Though easily stopped by us, this new run of spam uses a number of techniques to attempt to get past basic filters. Firstly, the body of the e-mail is simply an image (of a fake newspaper article), to try and get past text-based...

This post is made on behalf of my colleague Manoj Venugopalan, Malware Analyst for Symantec Hosted Services.

AutoIT, a free automation language for Windows platform-based development, is often used for scripting Windows-based applications and sometimes misused for creating malware. AutoIT scripts can be compiled into a compressed, standalone executable which will run without an interpreter. Auto2Exe is the application used to compile the AutoIT script into a standalone executiable.

Most of the malware based on AutoIT is in the form of worms and Trojans. Many such worms are well-known for logging into a user's IM client, changing their status message and then sending copies of the malware to all of the "buddies" in the victim's list.

MessageLabs Intelligence recently discovered an AutoIT Trojan using IRC (online chat) to connect an infected machine to a command and control channel without the user's knowledge. The malware is...