In cybercrime's mug sheet of top offenders, the "Dirty Dozen" of nations responsible for relaying spam now includes five Asian nations, including South Korea, which had the biggest increase to become second only to the U.S.
As compiled by senior technology consultant Graham Cluley for Sophos' Naked Security blog, the list shows how Indonesia, Pakistan, Taiwan and Vietnam have stepped into notoriety since the fall of 2010.
The “Spear phishing” attack responsible for the RSA network breach network in March demonstrated that e-mail remains the weakest point in enterprise security. Even when spam filtering systems that block a majority of incoming malicious and just plain annoying e-mails, the sheer volume of spam that still gets through presents a huge potential route for attackers to exploit. Now, one mail filtering company is offering a guarantee that it will block at least 99 percent of incoming spam—except if you happen to be Google, Apple, Facebook, or AOL.
NHS Direct, the UK helpline which provides expert health advice via the telephone and internet, has had its Twitter account taken over by spammers promoting an Acai Berry diet.
Because the NHS Direct service is well-known in the UK for providing health advice, it's possible that some followers might have thought that the link was genuine, and clicked on it.
Fortunately, Twitter is now identifying the webpage pointed to by the shortened link as "potentially harmful", but anyone who had clicked would have been taken to a bogus news website promoting an Acai Berry diet:
You're never going to get free airline tickets simply by clicking a link on Facebook and accepting a third-party app — not from JetBlue, not from Delta Airlines, and not from the latest airline name to be abused by social network scammers, Southwest Airlines.
A recently-spotted Skype spam operation has put users at risk of falling victim to possible fake antivirus attacks.
The attackers are using automated messages to place calls through the Skype VoIP service. The messages claim to be from a "system update" service and warn the user that their systems is currently lacking adequate security protection.
It was only a matter of time until cyber crooks would begin taking advantage of the DigiNotar breach and the news of the revocation of many of its certificates to trick users into downloading malware.
The latest spam campaign spotted by Barracuda targets the customers of the Royal Bank of Canada, and the email sent to them contain "Your digital certificate has expired!" in the subject line and a spoofed From field (click on the screenshot to enlarge it):
With the kids on holiday from school and a lot of people away this month, you'd expect things to be quiet on the malware front, but Israel's Commtouch is reporting a massive 500% surge in e-mail-delivered malware over the last week.
According to Commtouch director Avi Turiel, one of the lynchpins of this surging email malware campaign is the infamous UPS `you have a parcel' message, pushing email malware levels to around 5.5 times the normal weekly level seen in previous weeks, and emulating a surge that the web and messaging security firm tracked in March of this year.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals last week reversed a district court and reinstated a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) claim brought by an employer against a labor union for “bombarding” the computer systems of its sales and executive offices with emails and voicemails making it impossible for the company to communicate with its customers and vendors. Pulte Homes, Inc v. Laborers’ International Union of North America, 2011 WL 3274014 (6th Cir. Aug 2, 2011).
A Las Vegas man accused of sending more than 27 million spam messages to Facebook users faces federal fraud and computer tampering charges that could send him to prison for more than 40 years, according to a grand jury indictment.
Sanford Wallace, the self-proclaimed "Spam King", pleaded not guilty during an initial court appearance last week after being indicted July 6 on six counts of electronic mail fraud, three counts of intentional damage to a protected computer and two counts of criminal contempt.
If you get an e-mail message telling you a hotel has erroneously charged your credit card account, be careful. The odds are that it's part of a new spam campaign that could infect your computer.
The messages started popping up in recent days and there are already hundreds of variants on the same theme: A hotel wrongly charged a credit card number and the victim is supposed to fill out an attached form to process the refund.
