Fighting malware and spam

E-marketing companies compromised to send spam

Fake order confirmations contain malicious links.

Spammers have gained access to the accounts of email service providers (ESPs) and used them to send out fake order confirmation spam with links leading to malware.

The systems of ESPs are a popular target among spammers: they contain a large number of email addresses and other personal information (which, for instance, was the target of the Epsilon hack earlier this year) and the companies have usually made a lot of effort to ensure their emails have high delivery rates.

Being able to use these systems to send spam is likely to result in delivery rates many times higher than would have been obtained by using a botnet. Incidentally, it was through SPF, a tool used to improve email delivery, that researchers at Websense could confirm that the spam was sent from the systems of an Argentinian ESP.

To the recipients of the emails this may have been less clear: they saw what looked liked a rather genuine order confirmation from a popular clothing retailer. Of course, that fact that they did not place such an order could have prompted them to click on the links in the email to find more information.

If they had done so, they would have downloaded a zip file containing a keylogger trojan. This piece of malware takes screenshots and registers keystrokes when the user visits one of a large number of popular websites, including many banks and e-commerce sites. It is not hard to imagine the amount of harm crooks can do with information obtained this way.

More at Websense here and at Commtouch here. (The fact that both companies include details of the very same email in their blog posts - as does Cisco here - suggests that there was little variety among the emails.)

27 September 2011

Tags: esp, spam.   

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