One of the most common ways to propagate malware through social engineering is to piggyback it on some attention-catching news event. This can be carried out using a variety of techniques and is certainly nothing new. One infamous example from 2007 was Win32/Nuwar (a/k/a the Storm Worm), which distributed through spam emails with current and/or
The March Threatsense report at http://www.eset.com/us/resources/threat-trends/Global_Threat_Trends_March_2011.pdf includes, apart from the Top Ten threats: a feature article on Japanese-disaster-related scamming by Urban Schrott and myself news of the Infosec Europe expo in London on the 19th-21st April, the AMTSO and CARO workshops in Prague in May, and the EICAR Conference in Austria that follows the story of
In Giving the cybercriminals a helping hand, Randy Abrams discusses how most Facebook app developers are making session hijacking too easy for the cybercriminals. In A tsunami is also a crime wave I talk about the range of cybercrimes that have come out of the Japan earthquakes and tsunami. And in Supporters Club I return to
* Sorry, but I couldn't resist a Crosby reference. I was more than a little irritated over the weekend – see Faith, Hope, Charity and Manipulation – by Microsoft's use of the Japanese disaster to give the Bing search engine a little extra exposure using a chaintweet technique: How you can #SupportJapan – http://binged.it/fEh7iT. For every retweet,
I've added some commentary and resources on the Japan earthquake/tsunami disasters to an independent blog I maintain that specializes in hoaxes, scams and so forth, but here are a few of the same resources that aren't already included in my recent blogs here on the topic: Analysis from Kimberley at stopmalvertising.com: http://stopmalvertising.com/blackhat-seo/recent-japanese-earthquake-search-results-lead-to-fakeav.html Guy Bruneau at Internet
From my friend Rob Slade. He was writing at the time of the Haiti earthquake over a year ago, but the advice still stands, and not just for those who are uncomfortably near all those fault lines that seem to have been particularly restless in the last year or two. Thoughts on Haiti, Olympics, and
As you'd expect, there have already been reports of Black Hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) being used to lure people looking for news of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami onto sites pushing fake AV. (Stop me if you've heard this before…) My colleague Urban Schrott, however, offered some pretty good advice on what to look out
