While many are still in shock after the Boston Marathon bombings on 16 April, it didn't take long for cyber criminals to abuse that tragic incident for their dirty deeds.

Today we already started receiving emails containing links to malicious locations with names like "news.html". These pages contain URLs of non-malicious youtube clips covering the recent event. After a delay of 60 seconds, another link leading to an executable file is activated.

The malware, once running on an infected machine, tries to connect to several IP addresses in Ukraine, Argentina and Taiwan.
Kaspersky Lab detects this threat as "Trojan-PSW.Win32.Tepfer.*".

MD5sums of some of the collected samples:
5EA646FFDC1E9BC7759FDFC926DE7660
959E2DCAD471C86B4FDCF824A6A502DC

Our thoughts and prayers are with our colleagues in Massachusetts and others affected by the tragic events in Boston.

The 2014 FIFA World Cup has already kicked off, at least for Brazilian bad guys. Next year’s big event in Brazil has become one of the most prominent tactics used by Latin American cybercriminals as they unleash a real avalanche of phishing messages, fraudulent prizes and giveaways, malicious domains, fake tickets, credit card cloning, banking Trojans and a lot of social engineering.

Indeed Brazil figured among the top five countries where users risk being caught ‘offside’ by phishing attacks, according to a recent study conducted by RSA and released in January. The country is in fourth place, along with the UK, USA, Canada and South Africa. So it's no big surprise to find four Brazilian brands in the Top 10 most targeted on PhishTank stats.

Offers range from alleged cash prizes, trips and tickets to watch the games, while the attacks involve massive phishing mailings, and, to add spurious credibility, stars of the national soccer team have been ‘signed up’ by the conmen. Here’s one example featuring Neymar, the latest Brazilian hero to be dubbed the new Pelé:

"Win a new car, cash prizes and tickets for the World Cup, just click and subscribe now"

Phishing is not exactly a ground-breaking technique. Quite the opposite, it seems like it has been around forever. This is an indicator of its effectiveness: we might think that it is unlikely that people would give away their banking credentials just because they are asked for them, but still there is a percentage who continue to become victims of one of the simplest fraud methods.

However both user awareness and anti-phishing tools are making harder for fraudsters to succeed in their attempts to get our money. We see this changing in the decrease in the percentage of spam. That is not the only reason: users are switching to new platforms such as social networks for direct communication.

Today I want to show you an example of the creativeness in avoiding spam and phishing filters.

Summer 2012 will be packed with sporting events. This week sees the Euro 2012 football championship kick off in Poland and Ukraine. The tournament will bring together 16 of Europe’s best teams, and football fans from all over the continent will be watching closely regardless of whether their country qualified for the finals or not. Official ticket sales for Euro 2012 were launched on 12 December 2011, but spammers – rather unusually for them – were in no hurry to exploit the event. The first mailing offering tickets to Euro 2012 was only detected at the beginning of January. Since Ukraine is one of the host countries for Euro 2012, there were lots of messages in Russian and Ukrainian. The afore-mentioned message offering tickets was just one of them.

    Carolina Dieckmann, a famous Brazilian actress, recently became the victim of cyber attacks that allowed cybercriminals to steal personal property - nude pictures of her- from her computer. Many pictures or maybe all of them got leaked to the Internet. This incident has served as a good incentive for the Brazilian government to have new cybercrime laws in the country (the current law to fight cybercrime in Brazil was approved back in the 40’s of XX century). As a result of this incident, a new cybercrime law that carries a punishment of up to 2 years in prison for such crimes has finally been proposed for consideration. This is a good and right move! A press article in Portuguese can be

It may not be in the same league as Christmas and New Year, but with every year Valentine’s Day is being exploited more and more by spammers. In the week before it is celebrated this year Valentine’s spam accounted for 0.3% of all spam.

We registered the first Valentine’s spam as far back as 14 January – a whole month before the holiday itself – and it struck us as being rather unusual.

Like the majority of spam mass mailings exploiting the Valentine’s Day theme, this particular mailing was in English. It is a well-known fact that the lion’s share of English-language spam is distributed via partner programs. (Unlike other parts of the world, the practice of small and medium-sized companies ordering spam mailings or sending out spam themselves is not very popular in the USA and most western European countries.) However, the first Valentine’s spam of the year bucked this trend and had nothing to do with a partner program.

This particular offer for Valentine’s Day gifts made use of coupon services.

As you can see from the screenshot, the recipient is urged to buy a small gift for their loved one making use of a discount, an offer which the company made via the major coupon service Groupon.

Coupon services have proved to be a big success around the world. Every day various websites offer special deals on anything from two to several dozen goods or services.

Groupon is one of the biggest Internet projects of its kind and it’s fairly easy to find its promo campaigns online. The site also informs its subscribers about new deals via email. The company that sent out the first Valentine’s spam detected by Kaspersky Lab used an advert for this major portal, the legitimate Groupon email campaign plus spam advertising.

We’ve already noted that for small companies coupon services are fast becoming a credible alternative to spam advertising. Judge for yourself: the method used to spread adverts is the same – via email, but spam filters don’t block legitimate mailings from major Internet resources. Another important advantage is that the firms that offer coupon services are not breaking the law. The size of the mailing may well be less than a spam mailing that a company could order, but the legitimate mailing is sent out to the relevant region and the recipients are genuinely interested in special offers sent by coupon services. As a result, a targeted, legitimate mailing can be more effective than the typical ‘carpet bombing’ associated with traditional spam.

Coupon services have had a noticeable impact on mail traffic and Internet advertising. They have also affected spam. There are now a number of spam categories associated with coupon services.

The first is that of unsolicited mailings by the services themselves. This category of spam is quite rare – the more serious companies don’t want to tarnish their reputation by being associated with spam. However, some start-ups trying to break in to the market are willing to resort to spam in an attempt to attract subscribers or to allow their platforms to be used for promotions by other companies.

Another category of ‘coupon’ spam is that which simply uses the word “coupons” instead of “discounts” to make goods or services more attractive to users. These spam mailings can offer ‘coupons’ for some of the most unexpected items. For instance, the people behind pharmaceutical spam think nothing of offering a small discount on medications and passing it off as a coupon.

A third category of coupon spam includes things like the Valentine’s spam mentioned above. This involves a company whose offers are already available via a coupon service attempting to reach a wider audience by resorting to spam. As I see it, this approach is counterproductive. The majority of users react negatively to spam, and using it to advertise will only do harm to a company’s reputation. This is especially important as many coupon services rely on the trust of their users. Spam, therefore, can actually work against a coupon service, reducing the effect of a promotion instead of enhancing it.

The potential popularity of coupon services carries with it a specific threat. Users of the services tend to leave some money on their account balance so they can spend it at any time on a deal that takes their fancy. Although the amount of money stored on such accounts may not be very much, it is still likely to attract phishing attacks against the customers of coupon services.

So as not to play into the spammers’ hands, or to avoid falling victim to a phishing attack, when using these coupon services, users need to follow three simple rules:

1. Don’t open emails from coupon services that you haven’t registered with. On the one hand, this secures you against phishing attacks or mail traffic containing malicious code. On the other hand, if a spammer’s email turns out to be simply a commercial offer, you reduce the number of responses, making the spammers’ work less profitable.
2. If an email from a coupon service to which you are registered asks you to verify your account via a link, or to enter your login and password in some other way, do not under any circumstances do so. Remember that large organizations never ask you to send your login and password via email. Any such request should be seen as an attempt to steal your account. If you are in any doubt as to whether a message is fraudulent, it is best to enter the service’s website using the method that you normally use, e.g. by entering the address in the address bar of the browser or selecting it from a ‘favorites’ tab. Only when you have opened the site and are certain that it is genuine should you open your account and make sure there are no problems with it.
3. If you get a message from a major service about coupons that you didn’t order, don’t open the message and, more importantly, don’t download any attachments that came with the email.

Coupon services often send purchased coupons as an attachment in an email. If you have not purchased any coupons from the service, there’s a chance that an email attachment might be malicious. If you are not sure whether or not you bought the coupon, you can always check by entering your account. We have not yet detected a malicious attachment disguised as a coupon. Nevertheless, we recommend that users be careful – spammers that participate in partner programs are usually the first to react to new opportunities, including those that involve spreading malicious code. It’s just a matter of time before this type of spam traffic appears.

The long and eagerly awaited closed beta run of Diablo 3 has finally begun and Blizzard has sent out the first set of invitations to registered gamers all over the world. In order to have a chance to be among the lucky ones who can play it, you have to have a Battle.Net account and opt in for the closed beta run in the first place.

We have seen huge amounts of fraud mails in the area of gaming in the past, scaring the potential victims with disabling gaming accounts due to allegedly suspicous acitivities or security issues, luring with free bonus items and – you guessed it – invitations for a closed beta of a long awaited game or add-on of an existing – popular – game. The scheme works the same way in almost all cases: the recipient gets lured to click a given link and to type in the login credentials on the landing page – which is a replica of the original webpage of the targeted game. As a consequence, your beloved and well cared for account gets stolen!

After having handled thousands and thousands of phishing emails/webpages, they usually don’t actually reach me in any way or form. They are processed and added to our detection list in what is now a merely routine task. But recently I got a mail which was different because it appeared to be sent from my bank.

One of the main rules of IT security is to be very cautious when dealing with archived attachments in emails. “If you’re not sure, don’t open it!” It’s an easy rule to follow when the text in the message obviously has nothing to do with you.

When an experienced user reads about IT security problems at a bank where they don’t have an account, or about winning a lottery that they never bought a ticket for, then it’s usually immediately obvious that they are faced with yet another example of spam and there’s absolutely no reason to open the attached ZIP file. Cybercriminals will often resort to all types of social engineering to trick people into passing on their personal data and/or infecting their own computers. More often than not, they send messages that are made to look as though they come from well-known companies that either offer rewards for those that fill out or run the attached files (even stooping to threats of all kinds for those that fail to do so). But less mundane approaches are also used.

As we mentioned in a previous blog post, every time there is news of global interest, cybercriminals try to exploit that interest for their own malicious purposes. The death of Osama bin Laden was no exception – it was used in spam as well as black hat SEO.

We have detected two spam mailings capitalizing on the news of Bin Laden’s death, both of which were used to distribute malware.

One included a password-protected ZIP archive. The message subject was: “pictures of osama bin laden dead?”

What is strange about the mailing is that the text was taken from a standard spam message which is supposedly sent by a girl who wants to introduce herself to a man and is asking him to have a look at pictures of her that are attached.