To show how serious they are about their attempts to eradicate spam, fifteen companies have joined forces to help fight one of the most dangerous spam tactics of all – phishing.

This collective, known as the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), has come together to develop standards that they promise will help combat the practice of spammers sending emails that appear to come from a legitimate organization.

According to DMARC, its work:

“draws upon a history of private industry collaboration with 18 months of dedicated work, to outline an enhanced vision for email authentication that can scale up to today’s Internet needs.”

Who Is DMARC?

The group of fifteen who have dedicated resources to this fight consists of:

• Agari
• American Greetings
• AOL
• Bank of America
• Cloudmark
• Comcast
• Facebook
• Fidelity Investments
• Google
• LinkedIn
• Microsoft
• PayPal
• Return Path
• The Trusted Domain Project
• Yahoo!

And just what exactly they are trying to do is create a specification that allows senders and receivers of email messages to share information with each other about their authentication infrastructure to make sure that emails come from the organization they claim to be.

According to their website, DMARC attempts to address this by providing coordinated, tested methods for:

Domain owners to:

• Signal that they are using email authentication (SPF, DKIM),
• Provide an email address to gather feedback about messages using their domain – legitimate or not,
• A policy to apply to messages that fail authentication (report, quarantine, reject).

Email receivers to:

• Be certain a given sending domain is using email authentication,
• Consistently evaluate SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM(DomainKeys Identified Mail) along with what the end user sees in their inbox,
• Determine the domain owner’s preference (report, quarantine or reject) for messages that do not pass authentication checks,
• Provide the domain owner with feedback about messages using their domain.

So What Makes DMARC Different?

Most companies already employ some type of analysis on incoming email messages to include SPF and DKIM so this specification isn’t turning to something new. In fact, they recommend a continued approach employing other techniques such as high quality spam filters and rate limiters to form a well rounded solution to fighting spam.

What DMARC is trying to do is to standardize and streamline the process of analyzing messages because participating companies can rely on the coordination of the group to establish trust when it comes to determining whether or not a sender is legitimate.

In plain English, DMARC looks to form a conglomerate of cooperation between email senders and receivers (the organizations like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc. not the individual users themselves) who share information about the emails they send to each other. Turning to the information made available to the group, it can be easier to see whether or not an email is spoofed spam or a legitimate message worthy of delivery.

Not only is it the hope that less spam will make it through, but that resources will be streamlined as a result of these efforts as well. Large datacenters could see a positive result if all goes as planned.

The Flipside

Of course not everyone is completely sold that DMARC’s work is a panacea when it comes to ending spoofing and spam.

John Levine, one of authors of the DKIM related Author Domain Signing Practices (ADSP) standard, had this to say in an interview with Information Week:

“It’s a good thing as far as it goes, but it does have some of the chronic Internet tendency to put a steel door on a cardboard box.” Like many security standards that are not mandatory, if it’s not implemented then it won’t fail. Neither DKIM nor SPF are at the point where a recipient can say that they will only accept messages that use them. Therefore you still need to keep your eyes open.”

Using Bank of America as an example, it was pointed out in the same article that to fight phishing and spoofing in the past domains suggestive of the name Bank of America, as well as typos, were purchased en masse. Because the pool is so large, Bank of America was not able to purchase every domain available. For example, wwwbankofamerica.com is not owned by them.

So if an email arrives from support@wwwbankofamerica.com it won’t fail any of the checks from SPF or DKIM because it is not a spoofed email address. By all accounts, the sender is legitimate.

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Will DMARC Have Much Impact on Spam?

What we need is an Internet standard that allows this level of protection to work at scale – without any discussion, without any partner agreements,” said Brett McDowell, a security manager at PayPal who serves as chairman of the group. “That is what DMARC does.”

Setting industry standards is an important step, but still more important is getting the corporate world to adopt them. There will probably be some protesting and the inevitable excuses such as “I don’t have the time to implement them/train my IT department” and the most popular excuse “cost too much in time/productivity/money”. It may take some time to get most businesses aboard, but I think once they are, it will make a dramatic difference in the amount of spam and phishing attacks sent from corporate addresses or exploting popular brands.

What do you think? Will your company adopted the new standards? If not, why?

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Banks and Top Websites Develop New Spam Fighting Techniques

Malware developers seem to appreciate a little humor when it comes to naming their schemes. One of the latest email scams to invade inboxes everywhere is no exception, it seems, and the FBI has been quick to let businesses know that if they don’t keep their eyes open for a phishing scam originating in an email from FDIC, NACHA and the Federal Reserve, opening the mail’s attachment could be one of the most devastating choices in a young 2012. Worse yet, this new scheme appears to be linked to the Lord of the Greek gods – or its eponymous malware, anyway.

‘Game over’ is never a good thing, whether it means that your last ship has been destroyed and your quarter spent, whether it’s a lame and overused witticism that yet again has found its way into the mouth of Hollywood’s action hero du jour, and yes, even when cyber criminals are searching for just the right name for their latest piece of malware. While we’re not averse to debating the first two, our interest here is firmly with the latter. It seems the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation shares that interest, as evidenced by a security bulletin earlier this month that identifies a new email scam, one which cyber criminals have decided to call – what else? – Gameover.

Gameover is a phishing attack that appears in the form of spam emails spoofing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Reserve Bank, or the National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA). Like a multitude of others, the scheme preys on users’ fears and/or lack of vigilance, informing them that there has been a problem with their bank account or an ACH transaction (ACH stands for Automated Clearing House, a network for financial institutions in the U.S.). Sufficiently frightened, recipients are encouraged to click the included link, which instead of resolving the issue, takes the user to a malicious site where the Gameover malware is executed.

The malware has been identified as a variant of ZeuS, a notorious piece of malware which has been responsible for stealing financial information through the practice of keylogging for a number of years. Once activated, the cyber crooks can steal banking information such as account numbers and passwords.

As if that wasn’t enough…

More than just a keylogger, however, ZeuS (and coincidentally, Gameover) has an added payload. According to the FBI:

“After the perpetrators access your account, they conduct what’s called a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack using a botnet, which involves multiple computers flooding the financial institution’s server with traffic in an effort to deny legitimate users access to the site — probably in an attempt to deflect attention from what the bad guys are doing.”

But wait – there’s more!

In what sounds like a novel involving international intrigue, FBI investigations have been able to trace the attacks as far as to jewelers, as the stolen funds are used to purchase “precious stones and expensive watches from high-end jewelry stores”. The crooks contact the jeweler, tell them what they’d like to purchase and inform them that they will wire the money the following day. The following day, a “money mule” – a person involved in the money laundering part of the crime – shows up at the jewelry store to pick up the merchandise. The jeweler confirms that the money (the stolen money from the spam scheme) is in their account and upon doing so, turns the merchandise over to the mule, who in turn delivers the merchandise to the crooks or converts it into cash that upon being transferred, is effectively laundered.

Wow – It really is the stuff of imagination, but even more interesting is that the FBI has suggested that the mules could be unsuspecting victims of those omnipresent ‘work at home’ schemes that we see everywhere. While the federal agency has confirmed that many of the mules are willing participants, it has also noted that an increasing number are likely people who have succumbed to these schemes and have been unwittingly recruited into laundering money stolen from victims of the spam scheme.

Be on the lookout for this one and advise your staff ASAP. At very most, it could be a story worthy of a novel. At very least, it could save you and your users plenty of headaches and lost funds.

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FBI Declares ‘Gameover’, Link to ZeuS

People just weren’t spending as much money in the malls and department stores.

However every single study of consumer spending did show that companies with a strong online presence had a significant boost in sales this past year, including the holiday shopping season. In fact during December alone, non-store sales rose 10.6 percent from the same time one year ago. Even automobile sales online boasted a 9.5 percent increase.

To make sure they can stay competitive in the online retail sector, businesses must strive to build, and at the same time maintain, a solid reputation on the Internet.

Of course it was only a matter of time before spammers realized this as an opportunity to take advantage of this trend to dupe business owners into downloading dangerous malware.

How the Scam Works

Businesses are sent an email branded with the Better Business Bureau logo that reads:

“Thank you for supporting your Better Business Bureau (BBB). Your BBB receives more than 6,500 requests for information every day and provides reliability reports to consumers 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week.

As a service to BBB Accredited Businesses, we try to ensure that the information we provide to potential customers is as accurate as possible. In order for us to provide the correct information to the public, we ask that you review the information that we have on file for your company.

We encourage you to use our ONLINE FORM to provide us with this updated information. The URL below will take you directly to this form on our website:

CLICK HERE to login to your BBB account

You may also complete the form on the reverse side of this letter and mail to PO Box 1000; DuPont, WA; 98327; or fax to (206)436-5496.

Please look carefully at your telephone and fax numbers on this sheet, and let us know any and all numbers used for your business (including 800, 900, rollover, and remote call forwarding). Our automated system is driven by telephone/fax numbers, so having accurate information is critical for consumers to find information about your business easily. In addition, many consumers may search our database using your e-mail and/or Web address, so please be sure to include this information as well. As a BBB accredited business, you receive a free hyperlink from your online reliability report to your company Web site if provided to us.

Thank you again for your support, and we look forward to receiving this updated information.

Sincerely,

Accreditation Services”

Eager to keep their information and good standing current, business owners and managers who click the link are not taken to a legitimate site hosted by the BBB. Instead their computer downloads malware and their account credentials are compromised by the phisher.

Another version of the phishing scam informs the recipient of the email that a negative review of their company has been posted to the BBB site. To refute the claim, the recipient must click on the supplied URL and address the problem. Failure to do so would result in the complaint resulting in a bad report being filed.

The URL here also directs the victim to a malicious site and has the potential for account credentials being stolen.

Fighting Back

This newest scam is the third of its kind in the last three months targeted at business owners.

Businesses have been instructed, by the BBB, to contact them directly if they receive emails claiming that they have received a negative complaint or that their information is incorrect or incomplete.

The Better Business Bureau is also taking steps to fight the problem, enlisting the help of the FBI.

“Our national organization in Arlington, Va. has been working for three months with the FBI, and I can tell you that they’ve closed down over 50 sites”, Katie Carrol, Director of Media Relations and Communications with the BBB, said.

They have also asked for business owners to help them fight this growing problem by contacting them at phishing@council.bbb.org if they received these emails, or any others like them.

IT departments should also be aware of this scam and take necessary precautions.

In house steps that can help prevent problems related to this latest attack, as well as others, include:

• Keeping anti-malware software up-to-date.
• Make sure anti-spam solutions are configured correctly and up-to-date.
• Make sure that employees are aware of this scam.
• Put procedures in place for employees who receive this email, or other spam messages, to report it.
• Teach employees how to better recognize spam and phishing attempts.

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Phishing Scam Targets Victims Using Better Business Bureau

Naturally, such tools would be very useful for IT departments and system administrators to educate employees on how to spot phishing scams. Employees falling for such scams are a leading cause of corporate data breaches, and such breaches can cost a company millions.

“The whole concept with this project started out with the discussion of, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we could phish ourselves in a safe manner?’” said Will, one of the Toolkit’s co-developers. “It seems like in every organisation there is always a short list of people we know are phishable, who keep falling for the same thing every six to eight weeks, and some of this stuff is pretty lame.”

While it appears the developers had honest intentions when they created the toolkit, the fact remains it could be pretty attractive to the bad guys and they have no way of controlling that. Right now it doesn’t record any data typed into the fake phishing sites it generates, but they said future versions of the kit will have that functionality. That may make it irresistible to scammers looking for a way to create phishing campaigns that’s fast and won’t eat into any profits.

What do you think? Are these toolkits helpful or just asking for trouble?

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Go Phish Yourself?

The first one is a new incarnation of an old scam. Emails that look like they’ve come from your friends arrive with an urgent message about them being on a trip to a far flung place such as Madagascar, London, or Berlin and needing help. You see, they were mugged/assaulted and all of their money and documents were stolen, and they really need to go home but there’s the matter of their hotel bill. The messages generally ask for about $1600 to be sent via Western Union. Of course it’s just a variation of a 419 scam. If you get one, no matter how convincing it sounds, try contacting your friend first. In 99.9% of cases you’ll find they are safe and sound at home.

Next is the Better Business Bureau, who has joined the ranks of the brandjacked as new spam messages claiming to be from them are making the rounds. The messages tell the recipient that a complaint has been filed against them and urges them to click the included link to read it and respond. Anyone who does so is taken to a malicious site that attempts to infect their computer with the infamous Zeus Trojan. Zeus, distributes by a botnet with the same name, installs a keylogger and several other nasty bits on to the infected system and steals banking info and other sensitive data.

Finally, popular companies such as Facebook, American Airlines, Paypal, and several major banks are also being brandjacked by scammers. In some cases the phishing messages are receipts for fake purchases or reservations and in others, fake message or fraud notifications. In almost all cases, the attachments and links in the messages deliver malware. It looks like the spammers are hard at work building up their botnets!

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Several New Phishing Campaigns Going Strong

The year’s off to a rousing start, with all sorts of interesting security news this week: Wikipedia led a temporarily successful foray against SOPA and PIPA by joining numerous websites that went dark for a day; the founder of Megaupload had his hands slapped when law enforcement officials told him resoundingly, “no, you can’t pirate copyrighted material” – insult was heaped upon injury when dozens of expensive cars were towed away to show him they were right; and Koobface – the Facebook botnet that has been harassing Zuckerberg for years – was taken down by its own creators after the Facebook gang teamed up with The New York Times to uncover and publish the identities of the worm’s owners. To round off the week, QR codes (like the one in the image here) may just be the latest form of spam, and news out of the Twitterverse suggests that Darwin’s cardinal rule is not only true, it’s actually a dire prophecy of our impending extinction.

The year’s less than a month old and it may already be shaping up as ‘the year of anything goes’. Topping the headlines was a mass protest against seemingly inevitable anti-piracy legislation SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect I.P. Act), as innumerable websites intentionally went dark on January 18. Led by students’ greatest friend and perpetual source of dubious information Wikipedia, the activist movement irritated web surfers across the globe and scored one for the little guy as the bureaucrats in Washington, DC backed off the proposed legislation and shelved the bills, albeit temporarily. It’s practically inevitable that some wily spammer will take advantage of this controversy, so keep your eyes open and watch your back.

In a related story and in the spirit of fishy timing (i.e., the same week as the aforementioned protests), Megaupload founder, Kim Dotcom, was carted off along with several other geniuses who figured they would get away with providing a conduit for copyrighted material, all the while skimming millions of dollars off the illegal activity and thumbing their noses at the FBI. German national Mr. Dotcom, lamented as his lavish New Zealand mansion was raided and dozens of vintage cars were hauled away as the spoils of war. Again, there’s more here than meets the eye, especially now that Anonymous has its back up.

In an LMAO moment, individuals responsible for Koobface – a nasty piece of malware that has been frustrating Facebook and Twitter users for years – have taken down their own command and control server after Facebook teamed up with The New York Times to uncover and embarrass five of the founders – Russian nationals living in St. Petersburg, Florida. The named individuals have scrambled to scrub their online profiles, but it’s highly doubtful that erasing their cyber identities will have much of an effect in the real world, where police carry real guns and real handcuffs.

Are QR codes the newest spam threat? Some people think so. QR – or Quick Response – codes were developed in the automotive industry and have been used for a while. Slowly entering the mainstream  over the past couple of years, they are in wide use in Japan, the UK and the US, amongst other countries. Popular because of their fast readability and relatively high storage capacity (compared to bar codes), the increased use of smartphones with cameras and QR reading apps have made the codes a prime target for manufacturers and retailers; heck, even Google’s looking at getting into the game by using QR codes as a secure login method.  The problem is that QR codes can contain virtually any information, meaning that they are already being exploited by scammers and spear phishers. Keep an eye on this one, folks – and think twice before you take a picture of that code staring you in the face.

Finally, from the Twitterverse, here’s one that, no matter how much you shake your head, won’t rid that sickening feeling that the human race is on a collision course with extinction. Perhaps a case of ‘you can’t spell Twitter without ‘twit’, this recent article shows just how careless – or ignorant, or both – web users really are. Get this: over a twenty-four hour period, more than 11,000 Twitter users shared their email addies with the rest of the world. A safe practice if we were living in Thomas More’s Utopia, but it’s not the case if you reside anywhere on Earth, which is rife with people who would just love to use that information against you. This is just a guess, but it looks like spear phishing season is open and Twitter is the local watering hole.

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Week in Review: You Can’t Spell Twitter Without ‘Twit’

A new spam campaign is brand jacking popular social networking site LinkedIn to spreadlinks leading to shady domains. The emails, which look like notifications from the site telling the recipient they have a message waiting, contain links that allegedly lead to the messages. Instead they take the recipient to a pharmaceutical site offering fake prescription drugs and male enhancement products.

Spam involving these sites is nothing new. Even though the infamous Canadian Pharmacy ring was severely incapacitated when first Spamit and then Rustock went down in 2010, it hasn’t stopped spammers from trying to cash in on these fake pharmacies. While some actually sell drugs, they are almost always fakes made in India. Since these copycat drugs are made with absolutely no regulations or oversights, the FDA issued a warning to consumers to avoid ordering from these types of sites. There are also variants of these sites that are little more than fronts for phishing operations (people place their orders but never get anything and their CC info is stolen) or attempt to deliver malware.

While like most phishing emails, hovering your cursor over the URL will reveal that the link is fake, there are still people who see the LinkedIn branding and click, thinking it’s legit. What’s more unbelievable is that some of those people will actually stay on the site and buy something.  As long as these tactics work, spammers and phishers will keep using them.

Have you ever fallen for a phishing email? Even if you only clicked on the link, it counts. Share your story with us!

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Fake LinkedIn Emails Delivering Spam

Early Monday morning I received an email from Zappos, the popular online retailer.  Theemail informed me that they had been hacked and my personal info, along with that of 24 million other customers, had been compromised:

First, the bad news:

We are writing to let you know that there may have been illegal and unauthorized access to some of your customer account information on Zappos.com, including one or more of the following: your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, the last four digits of your credit card number (the standard information you find on receipts), and/or your cryptographically scrambled password (but not your actual password).

THE BETTER NEWS:

The database that stores your critical credit card and other payment data was NOT affected or accessed.

While it’s great that actual credit card numbers weren’t taken, the info that was leaves me and my fellow Zappos customers open to spammers and spear phishing attacks. It’s likely the hackers now know at least some of our buying history and can use that info to create very targeted campaigns, not to mention if they are able to decrypt the passwords they took before the account owner follows the company’s directions and changes it, theoretically they could access that account and go on a buying spree.

There are a couple of things to be learned from this and other recent breaches. Change the passwords you use regularly, and avoid using the same password and username on multiple sites. The hackers behind the Zappos breach will likely be able to find their way into other accounts because so many people use the same password over and over at different sites. If you’re a Zappo’s customer, change all your passwords and keep a close eye on your accounts, especially your financial ones.

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Zappos Data Breach Could Result in New Phishing Attacks

An open redirect vulnerability has been found on both Facebook and Google. This could easily be used to redirect users to a phishing page or a malicious domain. In a phishing attack, users wouldn’t even realize they’d been redirect, they’d just think their log in didn’t work the first time. This could potentially give scammers access to thousands of Facebook and Google accounts, and since many people have Gmail accounts linked to their Google accounts, access to those as well. A spammer’s paradise. Here’s a look at how it works:

Google

The Google vulnerability is located at the follwing URL:

https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth?redirect_uri=<malicious redirect>

If I’m not mistaken, I believe that this is actually a flaw inside of the Google API for 3rd party applications, because it is contained under the oauth directory. Oauth is what is used to make a secure link to an online account via a web API without the user compromising their password to an untrusted application.

Facebook

The Facebook vulnerability is located at the following URL:

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?h=5AQH8ROsPAQEOTSTw7sgoW1LhviRUBr6iFCcj4C8YmUcC8A&u=<malicious redirect>

In order to test both of these vulnerabilities, I recommend using the Facebook phishing tutorial found at Null Byte. However, when our web page is done, the link to our URL should be appended after the equal sign where it says “malicious redirect”. After you have crafted your URL, click it and see if you go through to your phishing page. If you did, pat yourself on the back and go mess with some of your friends.

What’s truly outrageous about this is that when notified about this, both Facebook and Google ignored the issue completely. Now as far as Facebook is concerned, this doesn’t surprise me. Anyone who has ever had a problem with the site and needed to contact them knows it’s next to impossible. Unlike most sites, they have no customer service or tech support email or phone number, no online chat or webform – nothing! Instead they offer a help center which really isn’t all that helpful, and a ‘Known Issues’ page where any and all user posts are ignored. So yeah, I can see how Facebook could ignore this.  I am surprised Google is though. They’ve always seemed more user friendly to me.

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Security Vulnerability Found in Facebook and Google – A Spammer’s Paradise

This week, a phishing attack landed in the inboxes of several US government agencies, spoofing the US government’s cyber security watchdog and response agency. Complete with attachments, the e-mail’s payload was a nasty little virus that has already been tracked back to Mother Russia. To make matters a little embarrassing, perhaps, it’s not enough that the agency which was spoofed in the attack has reported a disruption of its own systems, but it’s also the government body responsible for identifying and mitigating just this type of thing.

On January 11, news erupted of a rather malicious little spoof email that circulated through the mail servers of several national, state and local government agencies and even private sector employees. The scam in question was an email pretending to be the product of US-CERT, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, a division of the Department of Homeland Security.

Sent with fake source addresses that included soc@us-cert.gov and the subject line Phishing incident report call number: PH000000XXXXXXX and an attachment named US-CERT Operation Center Report XXXXXXX.zip, a nasty little file which was anything but a report. In fact, after some quick investigation, the attachment – which executes a file named US-CERT Operation CENTER Reports.eml.exe – was discovered to be a variant of the infamous Zeus virus known as ‘Ice-IX’, a keylogger that steals banking and other personal information. As if that isn’t enough, the worm also bypasses firewalls and other protection schemes.

Oh, the Irony!

US-CERT responding by doing what it’s supposed to do: it posted a bulletin and notified agencies. And while not admitting that anyone at US-CERT actually opened the little bugger, an operator at the agency has stated

“difficulty receiving emails due to the phishing campaign”

according to SC Magazine. A little embarrassing, considering that this is just the type of thing US-CERT has been mandated to protect against, it’s a forgivable fumble considering that the scam artists continue to get wilier and more creative in their attacks.

In an ‘it never hurts to state the obvious’ moment, US-CERT included the following advisories in its security bulletin:

US-CERT encourages users to do the following to reduce the risks associated with this and other phishing campaigns:

• Do not open the attachments in email messages from unknown sources.
• Install anti-virus software and keep virus signatures files up-to-date.
• Refer to Recognizing and Avoiding Email Scams (pdf) documents for more information on avoiding email scams.
• Refer to the Avoiding Social Engineering and Phishing Attacks document for information on social engineering attacks.
• Refer to Recovering from Viruses, Worms, and Trojan Horses document for additional information on how to recover from malware.

From Russia with Malice

The story gets a little more interesting from here, when Nextgov.com reported on Wednesday that

“Researchers outside of US-CERT traced the malicious software to a botnet – a remotely-controlled network of infected computers – that is taking commands from computers located in Russia.”

It’s not clear why researchers outside of US-CERT traced the location – it would seem natural that US-CERT was capable of doing that sort of thing. Isn’t it logical to assume that’s what the “response” part of their name is for?

Regarding the attack and its location, there’s clearly no love here, only malice. So why was an e-mail from Russia so specifically targeted at and around US-CERT and US government agencies? It’s extremely unlikely that this was state sponsored – the method used and speed at which it was detected suggest something far too ham-handed to be anything that nefarious. So taking that into consideration, the incident still poses something of an oddity. If a group, say organized crime – which is alive and well in Mother Russia – was responsible for the attack, what could they possibly hope to gain by phishing government agencies in the US? And if it was some cyberdude named Boris, who figured he’d take time from his daily routine of scamming innocents to pry into US-CERT’s activities, he certainly isn’t the brightest cyberdude in cyberspace.

It’s very mysterious, this one, and it will be interesting to see what, if anything, comes from the follow-up investigations.

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US-CERT Hooked by US-CERT Phishing Attack

In Part 2 of our look at what you can expect in the coming year, faint rumblings out of Japan suggest that one prediction from Part 1 of this article has already come true. If the very real prospect of becoming an innocent casualty of war isn’t enough to make you run backward toward the year that just passed, these bold predictions reveal how hackers will develop an even stronger sense of camaraderie, and how mobility is sure to become a four-letter word. And if you thought spamming and Internet scams made it personal in 2011, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

How about that? 2012 wasn’t even seven days old when news out of Japan this week revealed some eerie premonitions of the things to come and earmarks of a bold prediction made one week ago.  Engadget, ZD Net and other media outlets are reporting that the Japanese government has been working in concert with Fujitsu since 2008 to develop a powerful ‘cyber weapon’ – a piece of software that, upon the detection of a cyber attack (such as DDoS, for example) tracks the attack back to the source.

Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Sure, until you consider that the software also attacks and disables every machine it finds along the trail. The goal, Engadget reports:

“is to stop the spread of a malicious piece of code by finding and shutting down, not just the source, but all middleman PCs that are also now potential hosts. In some admittedly extreme scenarios this weapon could potentially spiral out of control, taking out far more computers than intended.”

Hmm… Botnets are nothing more than large numbers of unsuspecting computers carrying out their attacks at the behest of the infector and ignorance of the computer’s owner. Japan’s little toy, while it sounds like it might be fun to take for a spin, could have the unpleasant and unprecedented effect of being the cause of some serious collateral damage. Casualties of war? Here’s a tip for everyone: while you still have a chance, give that fave desktop or laptop of yours a great big hug before it’s too late.

1. Hackers of the World, Unite

Robin Hood met Mafia Boy last year as hacktivism took center stage. Indeed, 2011 was an entertaining year for anyone who followed the exploits of Anonymous and LulzSec. The drama unfolded like a kabuki play born in the mind of Ken Kesey and brought to life by a troupe of mimes with Tourette Syndrome, and there were even a few arrests along the way to make this reality show really…ahem… arresting.

Prediction: We will see some new hacking activity from these groups, with some high profile web takedowns in the process. While that’s not a stretch, this is: hacker groups like Anonymous and LulzSec will grow in size substantially, resembling an ‘occupy’ type movement that will take the war online. The civil and social unrest of 2011 will turn to face the financial behemoth that is the Internet.

2. Mobility Means Vulnerability

If we learned anything about spam in 2011, it’s that spam is like that proverbial bum of a brother-in-law who’s been living in your basement for the past two years. It’s not going away, good luck making it work for you, and you will be out-of-pocket at some point. Spammers continued to use every means at their disposal in 2011, with SMS spam becoming a real pain in the neck. Security flaws in the two most popular smartphone platforms – iOS and Android – just accented what we already suspected: that spammers and purveyors of malware had taken their show on the road.

Prediction: 2012 will see a massive increase in mobile spam, and mobile devices will become the swords upon which we will live or die unless we get mobile security under control.

3. It’s Nothing Personal…Well, Actually, It Is

A significant development in spam and phishing in 2011 was the way in which the scam artists were getting smarter; you know, smarter in much the same way that a chunk of igneous rock living at the bottom of a fetid riverbed is smarter than a rotting patch of lichen hanging for dear life to the side of an oak tree. Like it or not, the scambags are wilier, finding new and innovative ways to pick your pocket without actually residing in the same time zone.

Prediction: The scambags will become even cleverer in their assaults, finding new methods to lull people into a false sense of security. How this will occur remains to be seen, but our bold prediction is that it will most likely involve highly targeted, multilevel campaigns where the scammer will use detailed knowledge of the targets, and multiple contact methods like email, phone, SMS and even snail mail to enact their evil schemes.

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Bold Predictions for 2012 (Part 2)

In a turn of events appropriate for the most tumultuous year in cybercrime, 2011’s body is barely cold and we’re already smelling something suspicious from its decomposing carcass. Rumors of two worms, one well-known and the other relatively new on the scene, have some of us wondering what will happen next in 2012, and the year has only just begun. In an attempt to put the preceding year into perspective, we take a look at what might be in store for the new year and beyond with some bold and not so far-fetched predictions for 2012.

PREDICTION: A Shiny New Worm with Every Census Report, Tax Return and Piece of Monetary Currency

First up for 2012 is a prediction that all bets will be off when it comes to understanding the nature – and source – of some of the most insidious malware in the known universe. In fact, the threat and very nature of the state-sponsored malware will only get more confusing, and most likely more disturbing, as we discover where and how it’s being used.

Discovered in 2010, Stuxnet was in the news again in 2011. A worm designed to target and damage industrial control systems (like the kind found in nuclear plants), it has been a source of great debate over who created it and what its ultimate purpose represented; but few could argue that with more than forty percent of Stuxnet’s infections landing in Iran, the nation was most likely the target from the get-go. Russia and others wasted no time pointing the finger squarely at the United States and Israel as the benefactors of the worm, which surely must be state-sponsored.

It seemed inconceivable that anything could top the news that broke late in the year about Stuxnet’s connection to Conficker, suggesting that the latter, a notorious botnet, was used to deliver the payload for Stuxnet. If rumors are true that Stuxnet is state-sponsored, the implication that spam might have been part of the delivery method can and must only leave a bad taste in people’s mouths.

As 2011 wheezed out its last few painful breaths however, a new development occurred in this bizarre tale, as it was revealed that ongoing research by Kaspersky Labs on Stuxnet uncovered a direct link between Stuxnet and Duqu – a worm, discovered only in September, which shares many of the attributes of Stuxnet. In fact, media outlets are reporting that the worms are suggestive of an ‘arsenal’ of malware that has been in development as early as 2007. The code kernel has been dubbed ‘Tilded’, in recognition of the author’s habit of using filenames that begin with ‘~d’.

The Prediction: Keep your eyes open for Tilded. We will continue to see new pieces of the puzzle unveil, and they will point at the government of a country – or perhaps multiple countries working in concert – all but providing conclusive proof of the party (or parties) responsible for this new and nefarious form of warfare. What will make this story even more notorious, however, is when it becomes clear that an unsuspecting public has been a major delivery mechanism for this 21^st century warfare, through the use of spam, malware, and botnets. And if that is true, it could very well be the case that some of those spammers you curse on a daily basis are actually nation states using spam to mask their cyber intelligence activities.

PREDICTION: The Cloud Will Get Stormy

While the Cloud was one of those recurring themes that flew, for the most part, under the radar in 2011, companies like Apple and Microsoft continued to push it like it is a silver bullet and a cure-all for everything that ails small companies to major corporations.

The Prediction: 2012 will see at least three Cloud-based security events, most likely linked in some way to spam, malware, hack attacks or compromised mobile devices. Furthermore, they will be high profile events, targeting Fortune 1000 or Global 1000 companies, or less likely a government agency. Anonymous will take credit for at least one of the breaches, and there will be a link with one of the breaches to North Korea and/or China.

Next week, in Part 2 of this story, we’ll take a look at some other bold and controversial predictions for 2012, and how we can learn something from 2011 – but only if we’re ready and willing to listen to it.

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Looking Back At 2011 And Bold Predictions for 2012 (Part 1)

They would send their victims text messages informing them they had won a lottery or that they had been named in a will and had inherited a large sum of money:

 ”In the lottery scam, the victim receives a message stating that he has been randomly picked up in a lottery system of a multi-national corporate company, in which, he won one million pounds and then victim’s email ID is sought.

When the victim replies, he would be sent an e-mail, stating that he should appoint a UK-based lawyer to represent him to complete the process. The accused provide lawyers’ names and takes Rs 50,000 to Rs 75,000,” the IPS officer said adding that a fake Coca Cola company’s letter-head, mentioning the prize money, was recovered from them.

For tax payments in the UK, they further seek Rs 1.5 lakh. Once the payments are made, they say the cash has arrived in India and the victim should pay to RBI and Customs Department for clearance of the money. In this way, the victim shells out at least four to five lakh (rupees) over a period of time.”

The men are being held in Mumbai. The 419 scam has been around forever and while you would think most Internet users would have heard of it by now and wouldn’t be fooled, many countries in which Internet access was a luxury reserved for the very rich are now seeing it opened up to the masses as it becomes more and more affordable. This means millions of new users, and that’s what scammers are counting on and what is likely to be the reason this ring focused on users in India. It will probably be a very long time before the 419 scam wears out its welcome.

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International Phishing Ring Busted

1. Create new botnets and find new ways to increase and strengthen existing ones.
2011 saw the takedown of several major botnets as Microsoft teamed up with the FBI and went on the warpath, determined to crack down on spam.

2. Find new ways to exploit social media for gain and profit.
With Facebook still refusing to vet apps before letting them be released on the site, the possibilities for rogue apps are endless.

3. Work on new Black Hat SEO techniques.
Thanks to Google’s new Panda algorithm, which has put many so-called “content mills” out of business and made traditional search engine spam techniques such as blog scraping and splogs useless, spammers will need to come up with new ways to exploit Google’s search engine results.

4. Continue to refine spear phishing techniques.
Spammers have found that targeted attacks are more effective than the traditional phishing techniques that used a large and random group of addresses. They’ve also been finding new ways to make their fake phishing sites look more and more legit.

5. Continue to look for more loopholes and security vulnerabilities to exploit. This includes finding new ways to crack anti-spam tools like CAPTCHA and ways to hijack social media accounts and websites.

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5 New Year’s Resolutions For Spammers

1. Navy Researchers Develop New Spam Detection Technique

2. Spam Levels Hit Three Year Low

3. Malicious Spam Campaign Exploits Kim-Jong-il’s Death

4. Fake Reports of Hugo Chavez’s Death Involved in New Spam Campaign

5. Canadian Anti-Spam Law Creates Uproar

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Top 5 Spam News for December

University students in the United Kingdom and their parents should be on the lookout for emails purporting to be from the Student Loans Company. Responsible for administering the thousands of government loans for higher education taken out by UK students each year, the Student Loan Company recently sent out warnings to its customers about the phishing campaign.

Like so many other phishing attacks that claim new victims daily, this attack involves emails designed to look like they are from the Student Loan Company, but of course are not actually from this agency. At no time were the Student Loan Company’s servers or data compromised or involved, but the attackers have many ways to develop lists of students with loans being serviced by the Student Loan Company. Many students’ social media settings make their email addresses available, and discussing finances is not the taboo topic amongst today’s college students that it was to their parents’ generation.

The emails were sent to victims advising them to update their personal details on the loan servicer’s website, and included a link to a bogus site set up to look like the Student Loan Company site. Victims who clicked on the link and entered their personal details into the phishing site were providing their personal information, including user names and passwords to the attackers.

Unusual activity on student accounts may have been what enabled the company to discover that students’ accounts were compromised. The manager of Fraud Prevention and Detection, Heather Laing, was quoted as saying:

“We are currently contacting a number of students by telephone who we have identified as being at risk of having their details compromised, to advise them of the necessary security steps they should follow to ensure their details are protected”.

Without indicating how many students may have been impacted, the Student Loans Company is contacting all customers who may have been affected by this attack. They are also contacting all customers, reminding them of how to verify an email is from them, and reminding them that no email will ever be sent to them requesting account information.

This is not the first such attack to target students. Last week, the Metropolitan Police Service announced the arrest of six suspects in connection with a phishing attack targeting students back in August of this year. More than £1 million was stolen from victims’ accounts after they were fooled into entering their personal information into another bogus website. The six suspects face charges including conspiracy, money laundering, and violations of the Computer Misuse Act.

Readers should take a few moments now to share this story with their coworkers, family, and friends. Phishing attacks continue to plague users because they work – people are fooled into entering their confidential information into websites every day. Whether the attackers play upon victims’ fears, gullibility, or ignorance, they continue to attack users because they continue to succeed in exploiting their victims. By raising awareness, we can help others to not be victims themselves.

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Latest Subject of Phishing Attacks: UK Student Loans Company

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and what better way to take a look back at the year in spam than poke a little fun at the moronic state of the crap that invades our inboxes? In a year that saw major security breaches, several high profile botnet takedowns, and an unprecedented surge in personalized scams and mobile spam, we stop to reflect upon it all and submit a simple postulate: what if Dr. Seuss had been a spammer?

As the year winds down to a close, it’s only basic human nature to look back at the year that just passed and reflect upon it. In the world of spamming and Internet scams, that’s bound to be a painfully long look, since this has been a year fraught with new scams, major cybercrime busts, and unprecedented levels of security threats. With mobile devices providing the newest threat opportunities, and SMS spam picking up a head of steam as scammers get creative, we must be even more vigilant when fighting spam-related threats.

What’s in store for 2012? One must shudder when imagining the possibilities. If anything like 2011, next year will represent an even more dangerous landscape, cluttered with mines and booby traps the likes of which we’ve never seen.

Dire prophecies and doomsday mentality aside, it doesn’t hurt to poke fun at spam once in a while, and during the holidays, no one is more fun than the venerable Theodor Seuss Geisel, known to adoring children and former children alike as Dr. Seuss. Like many households, it’s a holiday tradition around here to watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, an annual ritual which inspired this writer to wonder: what if Dr. Seuss was still with us, and what if, ahem, wait for it…Dr. Seuss was a spammer?

The thought itself is sure to bring a smile to the face of anyone who has endured the miserable drivel that infests inboxes like brown marmorated stink bugs. Poorly written and replete with ludicrous stories that must have been contrived during bad acid trips, these emails often frustrate us, and occasionally make us smile by virtue of their sheer stupidity. What they do not do, however, is give us any confidence that the human race is poised to survive much longer, if this epidemic of oafishness is representative of the current state of the gene pool.

So without further ado, here’s a humble attempt at imagining what spam might be like, if written by Dr. Seuss:

The Spammer Who Stole Christmas?

Dear stranger, forgive me for this intrusion

I hope my letter will ease your confusion.

I will not, cannot state it enough

This is rough stuff, even a little tough.

There’s a Libyan prince who lost his good fortune

And my offer to you is a share of the portion.

I cannot get the funds out of my land

And I hope you will aid me by lending a hand.

You see, there are sums in excess of millions

If you give me your name, I’ll give you gazillions.

It’s okay to give me personal information

They don’t extradite criminals in my tiny nation.

Your bank account and credit cards are essential

They’re only for scamming and merely referential.

This is for good cause, I must admit

Send money now and show you commit.

I do not wish to enter a heated debate

Send it fast, send it now, it cannot wait.

The funds are for my stately Kenyan mansion

It’s in great need of a major expansion.

Happy Holidays to all!

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If Dr. Seuss Was a Spammer

A new study reveals that spam email volume has plummeted to levels not seen since 2008. Spam now accounts for 70% of global email volume, down from a high of 90% and very close to the levels seen after the shady ISP McColo was shut down three years ago. The drop in the levels is attributed to the fact that spammers have moved to more targeted attacks for their spam, malware, and phishing attacks, rather than the massive blasts to random addresses they have traditionally favored. Spam filters are also becoming more and more effective and users more educated.

I think social networking has also contributed to the drop. People just don’t rely on email quite like they used to. Instead they hop on Facebook or Twitter and send a message. Spammers will always go where the biggest audiences are and that means the social networks. Not only do sites like Facebook offer enormous traffic, they also offer something else spammers covet-trust. A spam link on Facebook or Twitter is much more likely to be clicked since it will look like it was posted by a friend and people naturally trust their friends. It’s this built in trust that makes spam so rampant on these sites. It’s hard for people to break the habit of clicking on their friend’s links.

Another feature that spammers love is Facebook’s refusal to vet third party apps. Unlike Apple’s App Store, which has a strict approval process, developers must navigate in order to have their apps made available for downloading, Facebook lets anyone post any app they want. This means rogue apps aplenty. They will respond to user reports and shut down such apps, but it would be better if Facebook had a system in place to prevent them from being posted in the first place.

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Spam Levels Plummet to 2008 Levels

Recently researchers have detected a variety of new spam campaigns coming from Cutwail. Among them are phishing attacks disguised as fake Facebook friend requests (if the user clicks on the embedded link to accept the request, they are brought to a fake Facebook login page and their details stolen), and malware laden ACH transfer cancellations and order confirmations for airline ticket reservations. These attacks are meant to alarm recipients and/or peak their curiosity and click on the provided links, which lead to malicious websites that attempt to download Trojans that add the victim’s computer to the botnet.

Currently the sites the malicious spam messages point to are hosting SpyEye, a dangerous type of malware designed to steal login credentials and other personal information such as banking info and launch transactions with that info. Bobax is a Trojan that sends information about the computers it infects to its command and control servers, scans the computer’s data for email addresses to harvest, and uses the infected system to pump out spam.

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Cutwail Botnet Still Going Strong