VB Migration

Tag: spam

  • Spammers use unicode trick to manipulate file names

    Windows executable appears to be Word document. An unicode trick that reverses the order of some characters has been used by spammers to disguise malicious attachments as harmless file types. Unicode enables the representation on computer screens of a very large and still growing number of alphabets, together with many special characters. Among this latter…

  • Adobe releases emergency update for Flash Player

    Zero-day exploit actively being abused. Adobe has announced it will release an update for its Flash Player on Friday 15 April, fixing a vulnerability that is currently being exploited. The vulnerability, which affects Flash Player 10.2.x on Windows , Macintosh , Linux and Solaris , can be used by attackers to take control of an…

  • Major email service provider suffers data breach

    Financial institutions among affected customers. Email service provider Epsilon , which carries out email marketing for many major companies, has admitted it has fallen victim to a targeted attack where hackers obtained some customer data. In a press release on its website, the Dallas, TX, based company plays down the attack, saying it affected approximately…

  • Cutwail botnet sent 1.7 trillion spam messages

    Operators made several million through botnet. Researchers from The Last Line of Defense and universities in Bochum and Santa Barbara have shared some insight into the workings of the Cutwail botnet (also known as Pushdo) after having managed to gain access to its command and control (C&C) servers. Using the logs of the C&C servers…

  • Spam levels take a nose dive as Rustock apparently taken down – update

    Eerie silence from Rustock botnet. Microsoft reported to have co-ordinated take down. Spam levels have taken a nose dive over the last 24 hours – apparently as a result of a take down operation by unknown anti-spam activists. The Rustock botnet has been responsible for enormous amounts of spam over the last few years –…

  • Spammers exploit internationalized domain names

    Non-Latin characters in URLs used to trick filters. By using internationalized domain names (IDN), spammers manage to avoid detection of URLs in their messages. IDNs were introduced in 2003 and allow for domain names in non-Latin alphabets, such as Russian, Chinese and Arabic, as well as in Latin with diactitics. On top of that, last…

  • Mrs Mubarak’s IP addresses used by spammers

    Spammers finding new ways to obtain non-blacklisted addresses. While not necessarily related to the current unrest in Egypt – which, among other things, led to the cutting off of most the country from the Internet – over 5,000 IP addresses belonging to the wife of the country’s president have been hijacked by spammers. The range…

  • New peer-to-peer botnet discovered

    New botnet shares fast flux DNS and other similarities with Storm and Waledac. In the last few days of 2010, security researchers discovered a new botnet that shares many similarities with the Waledac and Storm botnets. The botnet started with a spam campaign that sent millions of emails claiming to be holiday e-cards – a…

  • More than 1 million Chinese phones infected with malware

    Mobile botnet sending out SMS spam. Over one million mobile phones in China have been infected with malware and are sending out SMS spam, the Shanghai Daily reports. Masquerading as an anti-virus application, the malware installs itself on users’ phones and sends SIM card information to hackers who then are able to control the phone,…

  • Microsoft’s machines hijacked by spammers

    Servers also used for DoS attack on security journalist’s site. More than a thousand websites pushing spamvertised pharmaceuticals have been found to be using name servers on hacked machines in Microsoft ‘s IP space. Spammers and malware writers have a habit of hiding as well as they can and operating using hacked computers is a…