Category Archives: spam

Unsolicited email, IM, SMS texting, proximity-triggered behavior, usually of a commercial nature but also sometimes used to distribute links to malicious Web sites or malware executables themselves.

Millions of harvested U.S government and U.S military email addresses offered for sale

March 16, 2012 – 4:47 pm

By Dancho Danchev Remember the underground service offering millions of harvested emails for sale profiled at the Webroot Threat Blog in January? It appears  that cybercriminals are continuing to innovate in this underground market segment by offering geolocated databases of millions of harvested emails for better targeting in their upcoming spam campaigns. In this post, I’ll [...]

By ddanchev | Comments (5)

Research: U.S accounts for 72% of fraudulent pharmaceutical orders

March 16, 2012 – 4:41 pm

By Dancho Danchev Just how profitable is spam? Who’s buying the counterfeit pharmaceutical items advertised so heavily in a huge percentage of the spam campaigns currently circulating in the wild? According to a newly released report by the University of California at San Diego, although hundreds of thousands of people visit the fraudulent pharmaceutical scam sites, only [...]

By ddanchev | Also posted in social engineering | Leave a Comment

Spamvertised ‘Google Pharmacy’ themed emails lead to pharmaceutical scams

March 15, 2012 – 2:01 pm

By Dancho Danchev Cybercriminals are currently spamvertising a Google-themed email campaign that’s enticing home and corporate PC users  into clicking on bogus link leading to pharmaceutical scams. More details:

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Spamvertised ‘Your accountant license can be revoked’ emails lead to client-side exploits and malware

March 9, 2012 – 12:20 pm

By Dancho Danchev Cybercriminals are currently spamvertising a malicious email campaign that’s designed to trick you into clicking on a bogus complaint.pdf link which ultimately leads to client-side exploits and malware. The campaign is launched by the same gang that launched the “Spamvertised ‘Termination of your CPA license’ ” malicious campaign last month. More details:

By ddanchev | Also posted in Downloaders, Exploits, Keyloggers, malware, social engineering, Threat Research, Trojans | Comments (3)

Research: proper screening could have prevented 67% of abusive domain registrations

March 9, 2012 – 12:14 pm

By Dancho Danchev On a daily basis, spammers register thousands of new domains across multiple domain registrars, and take advantage of WHOIS privacy services to ensure that security researchers and anti-spam fighters will have hard time taking them down. So what can we do about it? According to a newly released research by Knujon.com, proper screening could [...]

By ddanchev | Comments (1)

Spamvertised ‘Temporary Limit Access To Your Account’ emails lead to Citi phishing emails

March 8, 2012 – 11:18 am

By Dancho Danchev Cybercriminals are currently spamvertising a fraudulent email campaign impersonating Citi, using ‘Temporary Limit Access To Your Account‘ themed emails as a social engineering attempt to trick end users into clicking on the link found in the phishing emails. More details:

By ddanchev | Also posted in Passwords, social engineering | Comments (5)

Spamvertised ‘Termination of your CPA license’ campaign serving client-side exploits

February 25, 2012 – 2:41 pm

By Dancho Danchev Cybercriminals are currently spamvertising ‘Termination of your CPA license‘ emails, enticing users into clicking on a malicious link supposedly redirecting to the complaint.pdf file. More details:

By ddanchev | Also posted in Exploits, mal-effects, malware, Threat Research | Comments (1)

Spamvertised “Hallmark ecard” campaign leads to malware

February 17, 2012 – 9:44 am

By Dancho Danchev Cybercriminals are currently spamvertising a “You just received a e-card form somebody” themed malware campaign, impersonating Hallmark. More details:

By ddanchev | Also posted in Botnet activity, Downloaders, malware, Passwords, social engineering | Leave a Comment

Pharmaceutical scammers launch their own Web contest

February 10, 2012 – 6:13 pm

By Dancho Danchev What are pharmaceutical scammers up to? From active participation in black hat search engine optimization campaigns, to spamvertising of bogus links – including QR Codes – and compromising of web sites with high page rank in order to redirect to pharmaceutical scams, scammers are keeping themselves pretty busy in order to monetize as much [...]

By ddanchev | Also posted in Blackhat SEO, social engineering | Comments (3)

Cisco releases ‘Cisco Global Threat Report’ for 4Q11

January 29, 2012 – 7:12 pm

By Dancho Danchev Cisco Systems, recently announced the release of ’Cisco Global Threat Report’ for 4Q11, containing threat intelligence based on Cisco’s observation of the malicious threat landscape. Key summary points:

By ddanchev | Also posted in Botnet activity, Enterprises, Internet security industry, malware, phishing, Targets | Comments (2)
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