A recent malware spam takes a new approach to hijacking your computer.
From: Internal Revenue Service [mailto:jim.lanton@irs.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2008 10:25 AM
To: User@CompanyName.com
Subject: Re: Company report for CompanyName
To : Firstname Lastname
The report is attached.
You need to complete the fields about CompanyName income.
Jim Lanton
IRS Fraud Department
© 2008 Internal Revenue Service All Rights Reserved.
At […]
I recently came across spam that was offering “Google Earth 2008″. In case you don’t know, Google Earth is a free beta product by Google that lets you view satellite images of our planet, probably including a view of your own rooftop.
“Why would someone other than Google promote Google Earth, a product that makes […]
Tags: spam
A four-part series of blog postings at Artists against 419 discusses in detail the massive abuse of Microsoft’s OfficeLive (MSOL) webhosting service by Advance fee fraud scammers, which I mentioned in a previous blog post here. Currently I come across such MSOL domains at a rate of about two new ones per day.
As the Artists […]
Four weeks ago I reported that Yahoo seems to finally have got a handle on the problem of criminals abusing its webhosting service for posting child pornography. Alas, the porn spammer only seem to have taken a vaccation. After those 4 weeks of almost no new child porn sites, they returned. I counted 36 new […]
Tags: spam
Nine months ago I reported about a series of child porn sites that were being illegally hosted at Yahoo’s webhosting service. At the time I was seeing about half a dozen new sites pop up every day. I am glad to report that about 4 weeks ago Yahoo finally seems to have done something to […]
Several of the main sites dedicated to fighting online scams are currently inaccessible because of a “Denial of service” (DoS) attack.
Fraudwatchers.com, aa419.org, 419eater.com and occassionally thescambaiter.com have been offline. Thescambaiter.com and 419eater.com are two of the oldest sites that fight “419″ scams (named of the section in the Nigerian penal code that prohibits fraud). […]
Tags: 419 · Computers · botnets
If you’re a regular vistor to some of our websites you may have noticed that the server was down for much of the last 48 hours. This was due to an online attack known as a ‘distributed denial of service attack’ (DDoS). In the first two hours alone computers with over 1000 different IP addresses […]
On March 8 the US Securities and Exchange Commission annonunced a 10-day trading suspension for securities of 35 companies quoted on the Pink Sheets quotation service. The suspensions aims at protecting the public from fraudulent stock price manipulation by stock spammers.
All of these stocks have been advertised to millions of email users via pam, […]
Tags: spam
In the last two days I was in contact with two abuse departments at webhosters. Though the reasons for contacting them were similar, I came away with impressions that were as opposite as could be. I called because of two websites, both highly illegal. Both were advertised in spam and I encountered them when checking […]
Tags: spam
Today I received an email which was a familiar scam sent from West Africa. I receive literally hundreds of them every day. What made this one different was that it carried a link to a malware site.
Any Windows user foolish enough to click the link and run the executable would get his machine infected […]