A few of days ago, we encountered an e-mail with a malicious RTF attachment. It was sent with a supposed lawsuit notification message. The e-mail didn’t mention any company by name and took a shotgun, rather than targeted, approach. Today, a security blogger forwarded us (and others) his version of the e-mail: At this point, it appears that the attachment has been replaced by hyperlink pointing to the Marcus Law Center. ...
Who wouldn’t want some tax benefits in the current economic times? Don’t phishers and scammers know that all too well! In a new phishing scheme, We found that Child Tax Credit is being used as bait to lure parents to disclose their financial data. This attack specifically tries to convince users to make claims for credit and lower their tax burden by using their children’s education expenses. According to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) website [PDF], taxpayers may be able to reduce their federal income tax by up to $1,000 for each qualifying child. Making use of this information, spam email discusses the expensive education of children and quickly advises recipients to use this expense to make claims for tax credits under the numerous tax benefits provided by the IRS. They make a further appeal that as a U.S. citizen or resident, recipients should apply for their tax returns. According to the email, users can get a tax refund of $75,000 for their children’s education. To apply for a refund, users need to complete a form attached to the email message. The fraudulent email has an HTML attachment named “#1924819299.pdf.htm”. ...
We previously reported a phishing attack on the Indian Income Tax Department. Phishing emails boasting of tax refunds were sent to users in an attempt to entice citizens to enter their credentials on a bogus website. Recently, new attacks have been observed in which the phishing website states that taxes can be paid online. As the fiscal year in India draws to an end, more people are rushing to pay taxes before the deadline. ...
Yesterday there was a volcanic eruption in Iceland, near the Eyjafjallajoekull glacier, that has led the Icelandic authorities to declare a state of emergency in southern Iceland. People living nearby have been evacuated in case of glacial melt water flooding and the airspace near the now active volcano is effectively closed off. As you have probably already guessed, any event which commands a high level of public interest will be pounced on quickly by the makers of fake antivirus software in order to make a quick buck. This incident is no exception. ...
Generally speaking, most website defacements I see tend to look the same with political activist Y decrying political activist Z, or leet hax0rs posting up a mile-long shoutout list to their crew. This one is, er, a little different – a defacement of what appears to have been a site involved in fish logistics and / or preservation, fish2see(dot)dk. I can only imagine the horror on the face of the site admin who woke up this morning to be confronted by this: ...
If you have children that play Neopets, you might want to warn them about this website or insert it into a blocklist of your choosing. The site is Neopoints(dot)tk, and promises lots of free Neopoints related items, with the help of a cute mascot called “Tuma the Draik”. I think there was a Norwegian prog rock group from the 70s called that, but I could be wrong. Of particular note here is the fact the site claims to offer “free magic paintbrushes”. These items are incredibly rare in Neopets land, and an excited child could easily wander into this particular trap as a result. ...
I have seen a lot of these lately. This one currently doing the rounds tries to dupe the reader into thinking that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) wants to use their accounts to transfer money meant for charity. In the email. the IMF (supposedly) wants to transfer $10 Million into the reader’s account using NatWest Bank. The contact details within the Bank are given as follows: Name: Mr. Donald Miller (Co-founder) Office Address: 11 El Shams Bldgs., 8th District Nasr City E-mail: Bernisecharityfoundationimf ‘at’ gmail.com Tel: (+44) 7031-939-750 Fax: (+44) 7011830323 ...
The DarkReading site is carrying a story about brand-protection firm MarkMonitor’s finding that phishing increased 62 percent in 2009 with 565,502 attacks in the year. MarkMonitor is based in San Francisco. Other conclusions in MarkMonitor’s 2009 BrandJacking Index report: The huge increase can probably be attributed to the use of botnets and the large amount of personal information that can be scraped from social network sources. 2009 saw the all-time high average of 600 phishing attacks per organization only 33 percent of victims were first-time targets. Social networks suffered 11,240 attacks – two percent of the year’s total. The U.S. hosted 44.7 percent of phishing attacks, up from 36.5 in 2008. DarkReading story Here.
The underlying structure of a typical website is made up of different folders and sub-folders, much like the ones that are on your computer. A webmaster (is this term still used often lol?) transfers files back and forth using an FTP client in order to update the website. In most cases, specific folders are created for a specific reason. For instance the ‘pub’ folder is usually a public repository that allows anybody access to. ...
I won’t abuse it, I promise…. cross my heart… spit into the wind… etc. Hi folks, Yesterday, I received this SPIM (Instant message spam) … usnews3.com sounds kind of official, doesn’t it? and the page looks impressive… There are lots of links on the page, but unfortunately, a mouse-over of each link reveals that they all go to the same place… That’s not a good sign for a legitimate webpage. Moreover, a whois shows that it was registered just on 7th December 2009, and that the ownership is hidden behind a privacy protector service. ...
Today there’s a phishing run underway in Twitter, using Direct Messages (“DMs”). These are private one-to-one Tweets inside Twitter. The messages look like these: If you follow the link, you end up to a fake Twitter page: If you mistakenly give out your credentials, the attackers will start sending similar Direct Messages to your contacts, posing as you. The ultimate goal of the attackers is to gain access to a large amount of valid Twitter accounts, then use these account to post Tweets with URLs pointing to malicious websites which will take over users computers when clicked. ...
Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “‘In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” These days we can add to the certainty of those two inevitable events with the addition of the annual scams that accompany tax time. For those of you who haven’t heard of this type of scam, it’s basically another way to separate a man from his money, or if you want to look at the bigger picture, a way to defraud the federal government. Either way, your wallet suffers. The financial website money-zine has a good article on the latest tax scams you may encounter on the Web. ...
Most of us are familiar with how high profile news events are used for malware distribution. We’ve seen it many times such as with Tiger Woods’ scandal and the earthquake in Haiti. Now the recent earthquake in Chile is used to prey upon unsuspecting folks interested in what’s going on with the post-quake and tsunami. This shows we should really be careful in our choices of where we go to get information. Try any related search term or phrase related to “Chile Earthquake”, “Tsunami”, etc. I’ve done so and will walk us through a few examples of risky to malicious content that my search turned up. This type of malware distribution tends to target the broadest audience possible, so I entered the search term “Chile” and then let Google auto-complete my search to “Chile quake 2010 tsunami” to load what is a popular search phrase. Almost immediately, among some recognizable news site results are random blog posts touting words like “download” or “.exe”. We should be suspicious of these. ...
Hot on the heels of the Patch Tuesday announcements yesterday, came the announcement of a new zero-day in Internet Explorer (CVE-2010-0806). Whilst checking through some URLs supposedly serving up malicious code to exploit this vulnerability, I noticed a link to some spam runs from earlier in the week. On March 8th SophosLabs saw spam messages attempting to trick the recipient into visiting rogue web pages. Messages used at least two social engineering tricks to lure victims into clicking the malicious link. ...
Hollywood celebrity Corey Haim has died in typical tabloid fashion: “under investigation.” And we all know that celebrity death equals Internet scams by the boatload. There are a number of spam runs currently circulating on video sharing sites such as Youtube, ready to catch out the curious and the unwary. Shall we take a look? “Suicide or killed! Watch Corey Haim first found dead” Classy. Visiting mycelebzone(dot)com will pop open a Hotbar prompt, which you need to install to “see the content”: ...