Phishing rises as spam takes a dip

2009-03-01

Helen Martin

Virus Bulletin, UK

Editor: Helen Martin

Abstract

MessageLabs report shows an increase in phishing and a slight drop in spam levels.

An increase in phishing attacks was reported last month in the February 2009 MessageLabs Intelligence Report, along with a slight drop in spam levels.

The report, released by new owner of MessageLabs Symantec, highlighted the fact that spammers and scammers have taken advantage of the current financial crisis, tailoring their messages to make reference to the harder times and to lure victims with messages from banks and financial institutions. Phishing attacks were reported to have risen from one in 396.2 in January to one in 190.4 emails in February.

The report also showed spam levels to have dropped from 74.6% to 73.3% of all emails passing through the company’s systems – although, much as expected, levels were higher around Valentine’s Day, traditionally a busy time for spammers.

Latest articles:

Nexus Android banking botnet – compromising C&C panels and dissecting mobile AppInjects

Aditya Sood & Rohit Bansal provide details of a security vulnerability in the Nexus Android botnet C&C panel that was exploited to compromise the C&C panel in order to gather threat intelligence, and present a model of mobile AppInjects.

Cryptojacking on the fly: TeamTNT using NVIDIA drivers to mine cryptocurrency

TeamTNT is known for attacking insecure and vulnerable Kubernetes deployments in order to infiltrate organizations’ dedicated environments and transform them into attack launchpads. In this article Aditya Sood presents a new module introduced by…

Collector-stealer: a Russian origin credential and information extractor

Collector-stealer, a piece of malware of Russian origin, is heavily used on the Internet to exfiltrate sensitive data from end-user systems and store it in its C&C panels. In this article, researchers Aditya K Sood and Rohit Chaturvedi present a 360…

Fighting Fire with Fire

In 1989, Joe Wells encountered his first virus: Jerusalem. He disassembled the virus, and from that moment onward, was intrigued by the properties of these small pieces of self-replicating code. Joe Wells was an expert on computer viruses, was partly…

Run your malicious VBA macros anywhere!

Kurt Natvig wanted to understand whether it’s possible to recompile VBA macros to another language, which could then easily be ‘run’ on any gateway, thus revealing a sample’s true nature in a safe manner. In this article he explains how he recompiled…

Bulletin Archive