Fighting malware and spam

Phishing & spam techniques

Despite the fact that phishing is receiving increasing amounts of media coverage, and people are more aware than ever of the threat, the phishing 'business' seems still to be very attractive for fraudsters, and new phishing tricks appear on a regular basis.

Here, we provide descriptions of common and emerging phishing and spam techniques seen in the wild.

• Nigerian (419) scam in an MS Word document (Oct 08)
• Blogspot spam (Feb 08)
• Meta phishing (Feb 08)
• Stock spam PDF (June 07)
• Advanced fee fraud or phishing? (June 07)
• The return of the animated spam (May 07)
• Do 'pump and dump' spam campaigns really work? (March 07)
• 'Mini' phishing (March 07)
• Pay per click (Feb 07)
• Broken link (Feb 07)
• Bye bye OCR? (Feb 07)

A comprehensive listing of more spammers' techniques - including techniques dating back to 2003 - can be found in The Spammers' Compendium.

Quick Links

Poll

virusbtn: September VB issue: LNK files, anti-unpacker, sender authentication, VBSpam review and more http://bit.ly/987AOC
4 hours ago

virusbtn: The VBSpam quadrant plots anti-spam products spam catch rates against false positive rates. Latest update at http://bit.ly/a2Ppcs
10 hours ago

Virus Bulletin

• VB100 – Windows Vista Business Edition Service Pack 2
• Apple pie order?
• Anti-unpacker tricks – part eleven
• Advanced exploit framework lab set-up
• HTML structure-based proactive phishing detection
• What’s the deal with sender authentication? Part 3