Archive for the 'Spam and phishing' Category

According to security experts, replying to phishing mail can be dangerous. There have been reports about spam mail, supposedly sent by old high school/college friends and whatnot, wondering what the recipient might be doing with his life, since it has been such a long time and…They miss you. Well, asking to refresh your recollection might […]

The new Windows instant messenger program has been released to private beta-testers last week. The new version will have a new security feature - Anti-SPIM (spam over instant messages).
There has been feedback that the new feature will be annoying at best, but possibly even dangerous. The point is that hackers may and do acquire users' […]

Light up some candles, since you've just missed Storm's birthday. To those of you who don't know what Storm is, well, it is the virus with the biggest botnet (essentially, a group of zombie computers controlled remotely) since a lot earlier in the decade. It is assumed that Storm's botnet has at least 1,000,000 PCs.
Storm […]

Voice Over Internet Telephony (VOIP) is bound to fall victim to voice spam, a point that was proven when the University of Columbia was attacked last week. It is difficult to say whether the target was chosen due to lack of decent firewall policy or because of the fact that the co-author of the protocol […]

Hackers have been reported to rely on a virtual stripper in order to get past CAPTCHAs (Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart). This method is most useful for spammers, who usually use web-based emails for their schemes, but often have the trouble of automating CAPTCHAs, which are used to help […]

The people behind Storm have added a 40 byte encryption to their command-and-control traffic between the bot-herder and bots, leaving security analysts even more at loss than before. This recent development has lead to the assumption that Storm's botnet might be sold to scammers or denial-of-service attackers.
In order to sell the botnet, it would […]

The time when hacking and cracking were occasional free time activities of solitary guys has passed. According to Mark Sunner of the MessageLabs, cyber crimes became a job for organized gangs since the year 2003. The tendency to combine efforts is still popular and it’s a big threat for everyone that has internet connection. Apparently, […]

Scammers are getting better at avoiding filters by using file formats not generally blocked or difficult for filters to disassemble. First there was "image spam", then the spam that used the PDF file format. And now the newest version of MP3 spam is spreading rapidly. Last week this audio form of spam has risen from […]

You hear about scams that lurk online every day. When you see as many articles about successful phishing attempts as this year, you may think that whole online scam thing is exaggerated. Some people even think that phishing has nothing to do with their lifes as no one is interested in their personal information. Both […]

Security researchers report a dramatic decrease of phishing emails targeting PayPal and eBay customers.
A research conducted by Sophos Labs says that in September 2006 almost 9 out of 10 phishing emails were trying to steal information from eBay and PayPal users, and now it’s 1 in 5, which is an impressive turnaround. Sophos informs that […]