Millions of harvested U.S government and U.S military email addresses offered for sale
Remember the underground service offering millions of harvested emails for sale profiled at the Webroot Threat Blog in January?
It appears that cybercriminals are continuing to innovate in this underground market segment by offering geolocated databases of millions of harvested emails for better targeting in their upcoming spam campaigns.
In this post, I’ll profile yet another cybercrime underground service selling millions of harvested emails to potential cybercriminals.
Research: U.S accounts for 72% of fraudulent pharmaceutical orders
Just how profitable is spam? Who’s buying the counterfeit pharmaceutical items advertised so heavily in a huge percentage of the spam campaigns currently circulating in the wild?
According to a newly released report by the University of California at San Diego, although hundreds of thousands of people visit the fraudulent pharmaceutical scam sites, only a small percentage of them is actually purchasing the counterfeit pharmaceutical items.
In this particular case, the United States leads with 72% of total purchases from fraudulent pharmaceutical sites.
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Spamvertised ‘Google Pharmacy’ themed emails lead to pharmaceutical scams
Cybercriminals are currently spamvertising a Google-themed email campaign that’s enticing home and corporate PC users into clicking on bogus link leading to pharmaceutical scams.
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Spamvertised ‘Your accountant license can be revoked’ emails lead to client-side exploits and malware
Cybercriminals are currently spamvertising a malicious email campaign that’s designed to trick you into clicking on a bogus complaint.pdf link which ultimately leads to client-side exploits and malware.
The campaign is launched by the same gang that launched the “Spamvertised ‘Termination of your CPA license’ ” malicious campaign last month.
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Research: proper screening could have prevented 67% of abusive domain registrations
On a daily basis, spammers register thousands of new domains across multiple domain registrars, and take advantage of WHOIS privacy services to ensure that security researchers and anti-spam fighters will have hard time taking them down. So what can we do about it?
According to a newly released research by Knujon.com, proper screening could have prevented 67% of those abusive domain registrations.
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A peek inside the Darkness (Optima) DDoS Bot
With politically motivated DDoS (distributed denial of service attack) attacks proliferating along with the overall increase in the supply of managed “DDoS for hire” services, it’s time to get back the basics, and find out just what makes an average DDoS bot used by cybercriminals successful.
Continuing the “A peek inside…” series, in this post I’ll profile the Darkness X (Optima) DDoS bot, available for purchase at selected cybercrime-friendly online communities since 2009.
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Spamvertised ‘Temporary Limit Access To Your Account’ emails lead to Citi phishing emails
Cybercriminals are currently spamvertising a fraudulent email campaign impersonating Citi, using ‘Temporary Limit Access To Your Account‘ themed emails as a social engineering attempt to trick end users into clicking on the link found in the phishing emails.
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Evolution of Android Malware “The touch, the feel of being tricked into sending premium SMS messages, the worst feeling of our lives” (Part 3)
by Nathan Collier
Android.SMS.FakeInst is a Trojan that aims to do one thing — trick users into sending premium SMS messages by pretending to be an install for an app. Here’s how the scam works: The user sends three premium SMS messages in exchange for an app, but there is no guarantee that it will actually install anything after they already have your money. These malicious apps are getting harder and harder to discern as malicious as the look and feel of these apps get better through newer iterations. One variant of these Trojan apps, which comes from a known malicious site, looks better with each update. Let’s start with one of the first iterations of this variant.
The icon looks fairly convincing:
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New service converts malware-infected hosts into anonymization proxies
What happens when a host gets infected with malware? On the majority of occasions, cybercriminals will use it as a launch platform for numerous malicious activities, such as spamming, launching DDoS attacks, harvesting for fresh emails, and account logins. But most interestingly, thanks to the support offered in multiple malware loaders, they will convert the malware-infected hosts into anonymization proxies used by cybercriminals to cover their Web activities.
In this post, I’ll profile a newly launched service, offering thousands of malware-infected hosts as Socks4 and Socks5 servers for anonymizing a cybercriminal’s Web activities.
An Evolution of Android Malware “When stealing data isn’t enough meet…GoManag …“ (Part 2)
In our continued series of how Android malware authors continue adding functionality to their work we take a look at GoManag. First seen last year, targeting Chinese speakers, GoManag is a Trojan that installs as a service so it can run in the background, collects device information and downloads payloads. Its odd name comes from part of a URL it attempts to contact to.
Malicious GoManag app running in the background as the name “Google Search (Enhanced)”
BlackHole exploit kits gets updated with new features
According to independent sources, the author of the most popular web malware exploitation kit currently dominating the threat landscape, has recently issued yet another update to the latest version of the kit v1.2.2.
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A peek inside the Elite Malware Loader
Just like today’s modern economy, in the cybercrime ecosystem supply, too, meets demand on a regular basis.
With malware coding for hire propositions increasing thanks to the expanding pool of talented programmers looking for ways to enter the cybercrime ecosystem, it shouldn’t be surprising that cybercriminals are constantly releasing new malware loaders, cryptors, remote access trojans, or issuing updates to web malware exploitation kits on a periodic basis, using the outsourcing market model.
Continuing the “Peek inside…” series, in this post I’ll profile the Elite Malware Loader. In the wild since 2009, the malware loader is still under active development according to a recently spotted advertisement within the cybercrime ecosystem.