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.

A large number of scam emails disguised as newsletters sent by the CNN television channel have been detected again. Sensational headlines are used in the messages to grab the attention of recipients (e.g., falling stock indexes, the election of a new Pope etc.). Users are asked to click on the links provided in the messages to get access to the complete versions of the articles. To make them look authentic, the emails also include links to real CNN pages, but of course the link with the main piece of news is fake. It leads to a compromised website which uses JavaScript to redirect the user to a site hosting malware – in this case, the Blackhole exploit kit.

At the same time as the CNN newsletter scam, there has also been an epidemic of scam emails imitating Facebook notifications. In these emails, spammers suggested that users check out new comments on their photos. The mechanism used in the malicious link was the same as in the case described above. The most curious part, though, was that the scammers did not even bother to change the links. While in the former case the link included “cnnbrnews.html” after the domain name, the same ending in the link provided in fake Facebook messages looks out of place.

Unfortunately, this is the only part of the scam where the cybercriminals were careless. Emails containing the malicious links are still being distributed, so be cautious when handling suspicious messages.

Is it a Skype day? Or maybe a Bitcoin one? Or maybe just both-

I say this because right after I published my previous post about malware ongoing campaign on Skype, a mate from Venezuela sent me a screenshot of her Skype client with a similar campaign in terms of propagation but different in terms of origins and purposes. Here is the original screenshot:

(Translation from Spanish: ?this is my favorite picture of you�)

There is a new malicious ongoing campaign on Skype. It�s active and kicking yet.

The infection vector is via social engineering abusing infected Skype by sending massive messages to the contacts like these ones:

i don't think i will ever sleep again after seeing this photo http://www.goo.gl/XXXXX?image=IMG0540250-JPG
tell me what you think of this picture i edited http://www.goo.gl/XXXXX?image=IMG0540250-JPG

Goo.gl short URL service shows that at the moment there are more than 170k clicks on the malicious URL and only 1 hour ago there were around 160k clicks. It means the campaign is quite active with around 10k clicks per hour or with 2.7 clicks per second!

The most of victims come from Russia and Ukraine:
�

What do you see here?

A free AV product protecting a Windows XP machine, right?

They�re stalking, taking advantage of the anonymity offered by the Internet and using the most advanced techniques to deceive their victims. They pose a persistent threat. They are often very patient and have sometimes communicated with their victims over a number of days, weeks, months and sometimes for over a year before they finally arrange to meet with the young person. They are a new breed of predators.

It can happen to anyone�and when it does it usually catches everybody � the victim and his relatives � completely unprepared. I�m talking about kidnapping.

Twice in my life I�ve been involved in helping the police track down and arrest gangs of kidnappers. The first case didn�t directly affect me or my family, but the second time a close friend of mine was kidnapped. And it turns out that our work in tackling cybercrime can also be useful to catch criminals who seem to have little connection with high-tech wrong-doing. The Internet is not just a tool for cybercrime � it is also often used to communicate with the families and friends of kidnap victims, especially to demand a ransom. When this happens, our work can be vital: evidence collected on the Internet as well, as the errors made by criminals, can help to track them down, identifying their location via their IP address.

��� Whenever an important event takes place, new opportunities for cyber criminals, especially for those who develop attacks based on social engineering, arise.� Currently, the whole world has its eyes glued to TV screens watching the London 2012 Olympic Games. Worldwide interest on this event is so strong that cyber criminals were quick to take advantage of this opportunity and launched multiple campaigns promoting alleged paid online TV programming that would allow users to see live broadcasts of the Olympic Games via the Internet.� Several fake pages were found with titles such as:

Best way to watch London 2012 Olympics online live stream HD
London 2012 Live Streaming

It is quite rare to analyze a malicious file written in the form of a cross-platform browser plugin. It is, however, even rarer to come across plugins created using cross-browser engines. In this post, we will look into a Facebook worm that was written using the Crossrider system – a system still in beta testing.

Image source: http://crossrider.com

��� 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