MessageLabs Intelligence Blog

Death By A Thousand Cuts - Rustock Botnet Sending More Encrypted Spam

Posted on behalf of Dan Bleaken, Malware Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services In the past few days we have noticed that the Rustock botnet has been sending a lot more spam using TLS (Transport Layer Security). TLS is the s ...

10:29 am Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Pharmacy Spam: Pharmaceutical Websites Fall into Two Distinct Operations

By Yuriko Kako-Batt, Anti-spam Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services   Spam is one of the biggest problems for all of people who are using email. And what we imagine when we think of the word of “spam” can b ...

8:20 am Monday, March 01, 2010

Targeted Attack Spoofs NYTimes.com and the Times Reader for Windows 2.0 Software

Posted on behalf of Tony Millington, Malware Operations Engineer, Symantec Hosted Services MessageLabs Intelligence tracked a new targeted attack yesterday using emails pretending to be from the New York Times sending ou ...

9:31 am Thursday, February 25, 2010

New Brazilian Banking Trojans Alert

By Manoj Venugopalan, Malware Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services Brazil is the biggest country in Latin America with a population of over 198.7m people, 34% of whom are connected to the internet. It is also a country wit ...

6:53 am Tuesday, February 23, 2010

DDoS Attacks Ten Years On

By Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services Ten years ago, on 14 February 2000, DDoS or distributed denial-of-service attacks – which attempt to cause disruption to an online se ...

11:24 am Monday, February 22, 2010

Targeted Attacks Now Using Bredolab Malware

  Posted on behalf of Tony Millington (Malware Operations Engineer, Symantec Hosted Services), with contributions from Dan Bleaken (Malware Data Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services) Today we saw a targeted attack ...

8:10 am Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Five Years On - Evolving Social Media Threats and Instant Messaging Spam

Tuesday 16th February marks the five year anniversary of the first US arrest for SpIM. In 2005 New York teenager Anthony Greco was arrested and charged with sending more than 1.5 million pieces of ’SpIM’ (spa ...

9:49 am Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Valentine Heart Healer or Password Stealer

Posted on behalf of Bhaskar Krishnappa, Malware Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services Animated heart shaped cards are common during the Valentine season to heal the restless hearts and it’s not a hidden fact that malw ...

1:25 pm Thursday, February 11, 2010

Gumblar Botnet Ramps Up Activity

On the heels of having learned that Gumblar infected three Japanese websites late last year, MesageLabs Intelligence has tracked Gumblar’s latest activity which has been heavy over the past few days, especially on ...

1:12 pm Thursday, January 21, 2010

As Haiti earthquake relief efforts continue, so do the spammers, phishers and scammers

Posted on behalf of Dan Bleaken, Malware Data Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services The Haiti earthquake happened at 21.53 GMT on Tues Jan 12.  It wasn’t long before we saw something related in spam, about 24 hour ...

6:06 am Wednesday, January 20, 2010