Epic Malware Dropper Makes No Attempt to Hide

By Andrew Brandt In the world of first-person shooter games, getting the most headshots – hits on the opponent which instantly take the opponent’s avatar out of the game — is a prized goal. The headshot is the quickest way to dispatch a foe in virtually every shooter, which is why the file name of [...]

Phishers Want You to Have a Coke and a Drive-by

By Andrew Brandt As recently as a few months ago, malware distributors went to what looked like great lengths to craft complex, sophisticated Web pages designed to trick visitors into believing they were visiting a page with an embedded video and — oops! — you need to update your copy of Adobe Flash in order [...]

Beware Spam With HTML Attachments

By Andrew Brandt When it comes to spam messages, conventional wisdom dictates that you shouldn’t follow links or call phone numbers in the message, order products from the spammer, or open files attached to the email. We all should know by now that you should never open attached executable files, and spam filters now treat [...]

Keylogger Poses as Document from Spain’s Central Bank

By Andrew Brandt An attempt to push down the Trojan-Backdoor-Zbot password thief to Spaniards may signal a new wave of attacks by a crew of attackers who spent the better part of 2009 trying to convince gullible Internet users in different countries to download and execute Zbot installers poorly disguised as transaction records or other [...]

Fake Amazon.com Order Emails Bring a Trojany “Friend”

By Andrew Brandt An ongoing campaign where malware distributors use email spam to deliver dangerous programs to unwitting victims has begun to change its tune, switching the scam to incorporate different brands. In the latest scam, the message appears to be an order confirmation from Amazon.com for the purchase of an expensive consumer electronics item, [...]

Modified Websites Pushing Trojans On the Rise

By Andrew Brandt For the past couple of weeks, owners of Web sites have been hit with a wave of attacks that surreptitiously infect unsuspecting visitors with a wide variety of malware types. The first wave inflicted rogue antivirus on unlucky victims, but late last week victims who visited infectious sites were redirected into a [...]

Massive Spam Campaign Impersonates Social Networks

By Andrew Brandt Spammers are the source of a flood of messages that appear to originate from various social networks, including Facebook and Myspace, as well as popular sites like iTunes. The spam messages usually just contain a link, and possibly a few words. Their subject matter falls into three general categories common to most [...]

Zbot Fakes ABA Banking Site, Seeks a Stimulus Package

By Andrew Brandt As the reign of nuisance by Trojan-Backdoor-Zbot continues, the latest scam invites victims to review a “transaction report” on a page supposedly on the Web site of the American Bankers Association, or ABA. (I wouldn’t want to call it a reign of terror; that might give the Zbot authors an inflated sense [...]

Zbot Desperately Seeking AIM Users

By Andrew Brandt The Zbot keylogger campaign-of-the-month targets users of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) with a message that claims to be an update notification for users of the instant messaging client application. Users unfortunate enough to click through the link in the email message to download what they think is something called “aimupdate_7.1.6.475.exe” will be [...]

A Look Back at the Worst Infections of 2009

By Andrew Brandt It’s not clear whether the past year will go down in history as a particularly bad year for malware, but one thing is certain: It was bad enough, at times, that fighting infections and cleaning PCs took priority over virtually all other work. Neither home users nor businesses were immune from wave [...]

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 546 other followers