Trojan Decodes Captchas Using Stolen Commercial Tools

October 2, 2009 – 12:38 pm

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 [...]

By mguthrie09 | Posted in adware, Keyloggers, Phishing Trojans, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

From Pixels to Phishers

March 31, 2009 – 9:10 am

By Andrew Brandt Over the past year, we’ve seen a huge jump in the number of mass downloader spyware. These small executable files have just one job, and they do it very well: They pull down huge numbers of additional installers, which in turn place a large number of password stealing Trojans, ad-clickers, and still [...]

By mguthrie09 | Posted in Phishing Trojans, Stupid malware tricks, Threat Research | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Adware Purveyors Panning for Search Gold

March 27, 2009 – 2:30 pm

By Andrew Brandt We know most adware companies are shameless in their pursuit of revenue, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen anything as bizarre (or hilariously bold) as the sales pitch from a relative neophyte to the world of adware, which calls itself SnappyAds. On its homepage, SnappyAds posits the hypothetical glee of [...]

By mguthrie09 | Posted in adware, Firefox, Threat Research | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a Comment
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