Category Archives: social engineering

The act of using technical trickery and/or deceptive tactics in order to convince a computer user to engage in a form of computer activity detrimental to the security of the computer and the well-being of the victim.

Awake at all hours during Cyber Security Awareness Month

October 25, 2011 – 10:19 am

By Jacques Erasmus I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately, and last night I pinpointed why. October has presented me with a perfect storm of Internet security developments: I embarked on my first few weeks as chief information security officer for Webroot amidst the most significant consumer product launch the company has ever had. These activities [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Keyloggers, phishing, Phishing Trojans, Trojans | Comments (1)

Morto Worm Annoyances Outstrip Functionality

August 31, 2011 – 1:22 pm

By Andrew Brandt The past couple of days have been very busy for a lot of people, following the announcement by Microsoft that they had discovered a new network worm called Morto. After reading the refreshingly thorough writeup about Morto from both Microsoft and our partner Sophos, we were surprised to find that a few [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Botnet activity, Deep Knowledge, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (1)

Brazilian “Winehouse” Trojan Sends Hotmail, Bank Passwords to China

July 29, 2011 – 11:18 am

By Andrew Brandt Late Monday, after news about the death of troubled pop singer Amy Winehouse had been circling the globe for a little more than 48 hours, we saw the first malware appear that used the singer’s name as a social engineering trick to entice victims to run the malicious file. Abusing celebrity names, [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Botnet activity, phishing, Phishing Trojans, spam, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (3)

Criminals Abuse Amazon Hosting with Rogues, Ransomware

July 20, 2011 – 11:21 am

By Andrew Brandt The criminals who push rogues at the world don’t really care about the reputations of the ISPs or Web hosting services they abuse. They leap from free service to free service until they’ve thoroughly worn out their welcome and, in some cases, destroyed the reputation of the service they abused. But they [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Advanced Malware Removal, Botnet activity, Ransomware, Rogue Security Products, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (3)

Phishers Cast Their Nets in the Social Media Pool

June 21, 2011 – 8:23 am

By Ian Moyse, EMEA Channel Director It can seem at times that the only people who like change are Internet attackers. And they don’t just like it—they need it. Technology’s rapid changes give cybercriminals new attack vectors to exploit, and new ways to turn a profit out of someone else’s misfortune. Take phishing, for example. [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Botnet activity, hijack search results, Keyloggers, phishing, Search engines, social networks, spam, Stupid malware tricks, Trojans, Website owners | Comments (2)

Fake UPS Document Installs Fake Microsoft Patch Payload

June 17, 2011 – 8:12 am

By Andrew Brandt As if we didn’t have enough to deal with this week — after a Microsoft patch Tuesday that brought with it a boatload of security updates for Windows, Office, Silverlight, Visual Studio, and other programs — some enterprising malware distributor is emailing around bogus tracking number malware dressed up in the icon [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Backdoors, Botnet activity, Downloaders, hijack search results, Keyloggers, Rogue Security Products, spam, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Comments (1)

Android ‘Angry Birds’ Malware Contains Bot-like Code

June 10, 2011 – 9:05 am

By Andrew Brandt Most of yesterday, Threat Research Analyst Armando Orozco and I took a closer look at a piece of malware discovered by a university security researcher, Xuxian Jiang of North Carolina State. The malicious code, which the malware creator named Plankton, is embedded into a number of apps that were briefly posted to [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Android, Backdoors, Botnet activity, Downloaders, Mobile security, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research, Trojans | Comments (16)

Why Put Security Into the Cloud?

June 7, 2011 – 7:51 am

This week, Webroot’s Thre@t Reply managed to steal some time with Ian Moyse, who knows a thing or two about the benefits of putting your computer and network security into the cloud, out where the threats are, rather than keeping your security inside your network or on individual computers. As always, feel free to submit [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Enterprises, Internet security industry, phishing, spam, Threat Research, Website owners | Comments (2)

MacProtector: Rogue of the Week

May 27, 2011 – 6:00 pm

By Andrew Brandt This week, we turn our attention temporarily away from the never-ending stream of rogue security products on the Windows platform and take a closer look at the Mac OS analogue, MacProtector (aka Mac Security, Mac Defender, MacGuard, and–if history serves–soon to be many, many other names). There’s been a lot of press [...]

By Lisa Bongiovanni | Also posted in Advanced Malware Removal, Rogue Security Products, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Leave a Comment
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