By Andrew Brandt
Hot on the heels of the spam campaigns involving emails which purport to come from the IRS, HMRC, and from your IT department comes another round of fake “notification” spam emails — this time, warning users to download and install a patch for the Outlook and Outlook Express email clients.
Like the previous rounds, [...]
By Andrew Brandt
For several months, we’ve been seeing spam and phishing Web sites which purport to be IRS notifications of delinquent non-payment of income taxes. Who can blame the fraudsters — almost no three letter agency of the US government inspires more dread and fear than good old Internal Revenue.
In the UK, the counterpart to [...]
By Andrew Brandt
A new Trojan quietly circulating in the wild uses components from a commercial optical character recognition (OCR) application to decode captchas, those jumbled-text images meant to help a website discern human activity from automated bots.
The OCR-using captcha breaking tool is just one component of the Trojan. Its main purpose appears to be to [...]
By Andrew Brandt
After all the brouhaha surrounding the NYTimes.com website hosting ads which spawned rogue antivirus Fakealerts last weekend, I spent a considerable amount of time looking at so-called exploit kits this week. These are packages, made up of custom made Web pages (typically coded in the PHP scripting language), which perform a linchpin activity [...]
By Andrew Brandt
As autumn approaches, the world typically sees an increase in the number of online shopping trips, as people take advantage of bargains from late-year sales, and prepare for various holidays. And, right on cue, we’re also seeing an increase in the number of Trojans distributed in the guise of “shipping confirmation” email messages. [...]
By Andrew Brandt
The body’s barely cold from last week’s BlizzCon, but the script kiddies who write phishing kits have been hard at work putting their best foot forward, crafting account-stealing code that targets gullible WoW players who want an early peek at the just-announced Cataclysm expansion. These Catphish pages, linked off of YouTube video postings [...]
By Andrew Brandt
A phishing campaign that started around the beginning of the year, targeting gamers who use Valve Software’s Steam network, continues unabated but with a twist: The phishers have registered dozens of domain names, such as trial-steam.tk or steamcommunity###.tk (where the ### can be a two or three digit number), which are used to [...]
By Andrew Brandt
Last week, I posted a blog item that explained how gamers face a growing security threat in phishing Trojans — software that can steal the passwords to online games, or the license keys for offline games, and pass them along to far-flung criminal groups. We know why organized Internet criminals engage in these [...]
By Andrew Brandt
Since the beginning of the year, my colleagues in the Threat Research group and I have been researching an absolutely astonishing volume of phishing Trojans designed solely to steal what videogame players value most: the license keys that one would use to install copies of legitimately purchased PC games, and/or the username and [...]
By Mike Kronenberg
E3, the annual trade show for the computer and video games industry, kicked off in Los Angeles yesterday, not long after the unofficial start of summer on Memorial Day. These events got me thinking about what many students might do with their free time over the next three months. I imagine that for [...]
