American Airlines customers, watch where you click! Cybercriminals are currently spamvertising millions of emails impersonating the company in an attempt to trick end and corporate users into clicking on the malicious links found in the spamvertised email.
Upon execution, the campaign redirects users to a Black Hole exploit kit landing URL, where client-side exploits are served against outdated third-party software and browser plugins.
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Imagine you’re a cybercriminal that has somehow managed to infect a 1000 U.S based hosts and is looking for ways to monetize his malicious activity? He could easily start spreading spam or phishing emails, use the infected hosts as a platform for disseminating related malware attacks, or basically data mine the infected hosts for accounting data to be later on sold to fellow cybercriminals.
What if all he wanted to do is earn as much profit in the shortest possible amount of time without investing more efforts into the monetization of the infected hosts? Is the cybercrime ecosystem mature enough to offer him an alternative? Appreciate the rhetoric. The maturing cybercrime ecosystem is fully capable of offering him a high liquidity monetization approach for earning revenue by infecting hosts and spreading a specific undetectable executable pushed by the pay-per-install affiliate network that I’ll profile in this post.
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Cybercriminals are masters of multi-tasking. For instance, whenever a web server gets compromised, they will not only use its clean IP reputation to host phishing, spam and malware samples on it, they will also sell access to the shell allowing other cybercriminals the opportunity to engage in related malicious activities such as, mass scanning of remotely exploitable web application vulnerabilities.
Today, I intercepted a currently active phishing campaign that’s a good example of a popular tactic used by cybercriminal known as ‘campaign optimization’. The reason this campaign is well optimized it due to the fact that as it simultaneously targets Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and Windows Hotmail email users.
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In 2012 it’s becoming increasingly common for cybercriminals to apply basic quality assurance (QA) tactics to their campaigns. Next to QA, they also emphasize on campaign optimization strategies allowing them to harness the full potential of the malicious campaign.
Recently, I came across to an underground forum advertisement selling access to 117,000 unique U.S visitors — stats gathered over a period of 8 hours — for the purpose of redirecting them to a Black Hole web malware exploitation kit landing URL. The traffic aggregation taking place through black hat SEO (search engine optimization), is aiming to exploit a group of users known to have high purchasing power, namely, American citizens.
Are such underground market propositions offering traffic exchange deals gaining popularity, or are they just a fad? What’s the infection rate for 117,000 U.S based users redirected to a BlackHole exploits serving landing URL? Let’s find out.
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Mobile devices are an inseparable part of the modern cybercrime ecosystem. From ATM skimmers with SMS notification next to fake antivirus scanners for Android users, the growth of the mobile malware segment is pretty evident.
In this post I’ll profile a recently spamvertised managed SMS flooding service, in the context of E-banking fraud, and just how exactly are cybercriminals using the service as a way to evade detection of their fraudulent transactions.
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Cybercriminals are currently spamvertising hundreds of thousands of emails enticing end and corporate users into clicking on links leading to bogus online casinos requiring the installation of an executable file.
This is the second bogus casino themed campaign I’ve intercepted in recent months, and the third time when I profile the distribution and infection vectors of W32/Casonline.
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Remember the “Spamvertised ‘DHL Package delivery report’ emails serving malware” campaign profiled earlier this month?
It seems that another cybercrime gang has started impersonating DHL in an attempt to serve malware to the millions of spamvertised end and corporate users.
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PayPay users, beware! Phishers have just started spamvertising hundreds of thousands of legitimately-looking PayPal themed emails, in an attempt to trick users into entering their accounting data on the fraudulent web site linked in the emails.
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Cybercriminals are currently spamvertising millions of emails impersonating United Parcel Service (UPS) in an attempt to trick end and corporate users into clicking on exploits and malware serving links found in the malicious emails. What exploits are they using? How widespread is the campaign? Is it an isolated incident, or is the campaign linked to more malicious activity?
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On their way to attract new users, adware providers and online marketers often come up with new and creative ideas tailored to average Internet users. These often include free screensavers, browser plugins, toolbars, and that’s just for starters.
In this post, we’ll profile the market proposition of one of these online advertisers, previously known as a vendor of adware toolbars, and discuss what has changed over the years.
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Remember the ‘Your Amazon.com order confirmation’ client-side exploits and malware serving campaign which I profiled earlier this week?
It appears that the gang behind it is back with another campaign, this time impersonating PayPal. For the time being, another round consisting of millions of malicious emails is circulating in the wild, enticing end and corporate users into clicking on malicious links found in the emails.
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By Nathan Collier
Every super hero has an arch nemesis. For a lot of Threat Researchers, including myself, Rogue Security Products, or better known as FakeAV, is theirs. Back in the day when I was primarily a PC malware fighter, FakeAV was a prevalent threat that was always coming up with new ways to infect users nearly every other day. I knew it was only a matter of time that the same malware authors would turn mobile. I am afraid those days are upon us. How could I ever forget such an identifiable logo:
“Android Security Suite Premium”… yeah, right! This spy which is being called Android.FakeSecSuit retrieves incoming sms messages, extracts the phone number and message, and then sends the stolen info off:
As you can see in the GET command from the PCAP, highlighted in blue is the phone number and message I sent to my test phone now being sent off to a site.
Now that the developers of the popular FakeAV malware have entered into the mobile world expect to to see a lot more variations of this… and if they follow the same pattern as they did in the PC world, I mean A LOT! We are seeing it in Torrents and/or alternative markets. Remember, when downloading Android apps choose them wisely and download from a trusted source. Check reviews, research the developer and verify permissions requested before downloading. And of course, scan with Webroot SecureAnywhere Mobile.