VB Migration

Tag: yahoo

  • VB2014 preview: Optimized mal-ops. Hack the ad network like a boss

    Researchers Vadim Kotov and Rahul Kashyap to discuss how advertisements are the new exploit kits. In the weeks running up to VB2014 (the 24th Virus Bulletin International Conference), we will look at some of the research that will be presented at the event. In the second of this series, we look at the paper ‘…

  • Paper: IcoScript: using webmail to control malware

    RAT gets instructions from Yahoo Mail address. One of the big challenges for malicious actors in operating a RAT (remote administration tool) is how to control the malware and retrieve data gathered from the infected machine. Listening on a certain port, or regularly connecting to a remote server, is behaviour that is likely to be…

  • AOL spam spreads ‘NotCompatible’ Android trojan

    AOL responds by following Yahoo! in setting strict DMARC policy. This week, #AOLhacked has become a popular hashtag on Twitter : many AOL users are using it to complain that their email address had been sending spam to their contacts. Those who click the link in the emails – never a wise thing to do…

  • Yahoo’s DMARC policy wreaks havoc among mailing lists

    Collateral damage in instruction to reject emails with invalid DKIM signatures. A change in Yahoo ‘s DMARC policy has caused frustration among operators of many mailing lists and their subscribers. On its official website , DMARC is described as standardizing “how email receivers perform email authentication using the well-known SPF and DKIM mechanisms”. It was…

  • New email header attempts to prevent damage of reissued email addresses

    Transactional emails not delivered if the account’s owner has changed in the meantime. When in June, Yahoo announced it would free up inactive user IDs, it received fierce criticism from the security community. The concern was that many of these user IDs are tied to email addresses that, though dormant, may still be registered as…

  • Compromised Yahoo! accounts continue to spread Android malware

    Problem likely to be on Yahoo!’s side. In recent weeks, we have noticed an uptick in the amount of spam sent from compromised Yahoo! accounts; we have reasons to believe the problems are on Yahoo! ‘s side, rather than that of its users’. Spam sent from compromised accounts is notoriously hard to filter: the sender…

  • VB data supports Google’s claim to having reduced compromised accounts

    Internet giant may indeed do something right; Yahoo! has a real problem. Internet giant Google claims that a ‘complex risk analysis’ using ‘more than 120 variables’ has reduced the number of compromised accounts on its system by 99.7% since 2011. VB ‘s data suggests that this could indeed be the case. It is usually good…

  • ‘Hotmail and Gmail have best spam filter’ says Cascade spam test

    Comparative test did not take false positives into account. Researchers from Cascade Insights performed a comparative spam filtering test on the three major webmail providers and concluded that Hotmail performed best, shortly followed by Gmail , with Yahoo! a distant third. The researchers registered accounts at all three providers and, for comparison, a fourth one…

  • Webmail data leak hype deflated

    Rumoured phishing explosion grabs headlines, reality much more mundane. This week has seen some major news organisations picking up on the story of tens of thousands of sets of webmail access data appearing online, with rumours of a major and highly effective phishing campaign – possibly targeting children – rife across the web. As the…

  • Yahoo! re-opens e-postage discussion

    ‘CentMail’ to benefit charities, harm spammers. Online giant Yahoo! has launched a website to give a charitable twist to the old idea of combating spam by making senders pay a small price for every email they send. The project, dubbed CentMail in a pun on the popular mail agent sendmail , lets senders voluntarily donate…