Posts Tagged ‘botnet’
Saturday, March 23rd, 2013
It seems that almost every tool Google provides is readily adopted by spammers and scammers alike. Not a day goes by that we don’t see spam and Phishing fraud and other identity theft emails from hacked Gmail and Google Groups accounts and often abusing systems such as Google Docs.
The ubiquity of these free services makes for the perfect no-cost social engineering platform for hackers to use for launching their attacks.
A current Phishing campaign uses stolen Gmail accounts to steal the credentials to other email accounts, allowing spammers to increase their spam volume day over day.
The most common email circulating now comes with a subject that references the sharing of a file though “Google Docs” and often has a subject line of simply:
Subject: Important Document
Since the email comes from a previously hijacked account, the recipients will typically recognize the sender’s address which makes it more likely that they will be taken in by this fraud:
more »
Tags: botnet, fraud, phishing, scam, spoofing, virus
Posted in Email Fraud, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
Thursday, February 21st, 2013
With the fake Better Business Bureau Trojan Horse campaign, we find yet another infectious email that is socially engineered so well, that users often release such messages from quarantine; even after spam filtering has clearly identified the emails as a Virus carrying Trojan Horse.
The emails typically arrive with spoofed headers such as:
Subject: FW: Complaint Case 091921
From: “Better Business Bureau” <Kerri_Rucker@newyork.bbb.org>
In order to appear legitimate and to try and evade simple spam filtering systems, the Complaint Case number will be randomized, and the spoofed sending email address will vary as well.
The content will include vague yet serious sounding allegations, such as:
The Better Business Bureau has received the above-referenced complaint from one of your customers regarding their dealings with you. The details of the consumer’s concern are included on the reverse. Please review this matter and advise us of your position.
A full copy of such the bogus email:
more »
Tags: botnet, fraud, phishing, spoofing, virus, zombie
Posted in Email Fraud, Phishing Lessons, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
Sunday, January 20th, 2013
For the thirteenth consecutive evaluation, OnlyMyEmail has again blocked more spam than any other filtering system in the Virus Bulletin VBSpam Challenge and secured yet another first place finish.
The latest competition ran for 16 consecutive days, during which, OnlyMyEmail’s MX-Defender accurately filtered out more spam than all other competitors tested, again missing just 1 single spam email out of 92,166 total. This represents a spam capture rate of 99.9989%.
By comparison, the next best capture rate was Libra Esva which missed 44 emails in total. The third best blocking rate went to Zerospam which missed 61 spam emails from the same corpus. The worst performers, missing well over 500 spam emails included: IBM, Sophos, SPAMfighter, Vamsoft, Spamhaus ZEN+DBL and SURBL.
more »
Tags: anti-virus, botnet, email, fraud, malware, phishing, scam, spam, Virus Bulletin VBSpam Competition, zombie
Posted in All About Email, Message Control, Phishing Lessons, Spam News, Spam-Stats | Comments Off
Monday, January 14th, 2013
Sometimes spam, viruses and Trojan Horse emails are so convincing that they manage to trick users even after spam filtering has clearly identified the emails for their true nature.
The recent spate in bogus “Your order is awaiting verification!” emails claiming to be from Staples office supplies is a pretty good example.
Despite being clearly marked as viruses, we’ve seen many users attempt to resend these blocked messages to themselves, apparently believing that our blocking these messages represents a false-positive result on the part of our filtering, whereas the opposite is the case.
The emails typically arrive with spoofed headers such as:
Subject: Your order is awaiting verification!
From: ”Staples Advantage Orders” <Order@staplesadvantage.com>
more »
Tags: botnet, fraud, malware, spam, spoofing, virus
Posted in Phishing Lessons, Spam Tactics | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, November 13th, 2012
For the twelfth consecutive time, OnlyMyEmail has again blocked more spam than any other filtering system in the Virus Bulletin VBSpam Challenge.
The latest competition ran for 16 consecutive days, during which, OnlyMyEmail’s MX-Defender accurately filtered out more spam than all other competitors tested, missing just 1 single spam email out of 134,418 total. This represents a spam capture rate of 99.9993%.
By comparison, the next best capture rate was Libra Esva which missed 56 emails in total. The third best blocking rate went to Kaspersky LMS which missed 94 spam emails from the same corpus. The worst performers, missing well over 1,000 spam emails included: Bitdefender, IBM, CronLab, Vamsoft ORF and SPAMfighter, Spamhaus ZEN+DBL and SURBL.
more »
Tags: anti-virus, botnet, email, fraud, malware, phishing, scam, spam, spoofing, virus, Virus Bulletin VBSpam Competition
Posted in All About Email, Spam News, Spam-Stats | Comments Off
Thursday, January 19th, 2012
Here’s something we really don’t see every day….
We recently received an email claiming to be from the U.S Department of Justice Victim Notification System (VNS)
Subject: US Department of Justice Victim Notification System
From: Courtney Walker <fedemail@vns.usdoj.gov>
To: Business Representative <address>
Our typical “common sense” check for email Phishing Fraud starts with the obvious:
- Overly serious/threatening Subject line…. check!
- Human sender doesn’t match email address…. check!
- Impersonal and generic salutation… check!
The email itself open with:
DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL.
U.S. Department of Justice
Federal Bureau of Investigation
FBI – New York
26 Federal Plaza, 23rd Floor
New York, NY 10278
Phone: (212) 384-2564
Fax: (212) 384-4104
more »
Tags: botnet, DOJ, FBI, fraud, Government, humor, phishing, Privacy, scam, Security, spam, spoofing
Posted in Above The Law, Email Fraud, Message Control, Phishing Lessons | Comments Off
Monday, August 15th, 2011
Look out for fraudulent emails spoofing “The Electronic Payments Association” that are arriving as:
From: risk_manager@nacha.org
Subject: Rejected ACH payment
In reality these messages are from previously infected personal computers from across the globe:
from [122.168.251.32] (helo=ABTS-mp-dynamic-032.251.168.122.airtelbroadband.in)
These messages include a fictional warning that includes content such as:
The ACH transaction (ID: 32604668345041), recently sent from your checking account (by you or any other person), was rejected by the other financial institution.
more »
Tags: botnet, fraud, malware, phishing, scam, spoofing, zombie
Posted in Email Fraud, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
Saturday, July 16th, 2011
Mailboxes are now receiving fake Skype upgrade spam sent from hijacked Rhapsody.com mail servers.
The current campaign arrives as:
Subject: New Skype Has Been Releases ! Upgrade Now
From: ”Skype” <newsletter@news.skype.com>
In an interesting twist, the spammers involved appear to have hacked and are in control of Rhapsody.com mail servers as the samples we’ve reviewed so far are actually from:
- mta900.e.rhapsody.com ([63.211.90.40]
- mta902.e.rhapsody.com ([63.211.90.42]
- mta903.e.rhapsody.com ([63.211.90.43]
- mta904.e.rhapsody.com ([63.211.90.44]
- mta905.e.rhapsody.com ([63.211.90.45]
- etc., etc.
The spam email itself is as follows:
more »
Tags: botnet, email, fraud, malware, scam, spoofing, virus, zombie
Posted in Email Fraud, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010
We’re currently seeing a significant volume of bogus USAA Phishing fraud emails that all claim to come from “USAA.Web.Services@customermail.usaa.com.”
These messages are of course spoofed, actually originating from infected and compromised personal computers around the globe, operating as part of larger zombie bot-nets.
While the fake sending address is consistent, subject line content is varied, such as: more »
Tags: botnet, phishing, spoofing
Posted in Email Fraud, Phishing Lessons | Comments Off
Monday, November 22nd, 2010
Today, in the “more proof that there’s nothing new under the sun” category, we’re going to discuss the Taliban Virus.
The so-called “Taliban Virus” is a MANUAL virus. A manual virus requires you to voluntarily damage your computer because the virus is not sophisticated enough to do it by itself.
Yes, this is a joke. more »
Tags: botnet, funny, viruses
Posted in All About Email, Message Control, Spam Tactics | 7 Comments »
