Dodgy ISP McColo briefly comes online, updates botnet

McColo has been identified as hosting the command-and-control servers for no less than five large botnets that are responsible for the majority of the world’s spam. When McColo dropped offline, analysts found that spam levels dropped up to 75%.

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Phishers Take Aim at Slingshot

The Trend Micro Content Security Team just discovered a phishing attack targeting Slingshot Communications, Inc. A phishing email pretends to update a customer’s existing account. It also includes the legitimate contact number of the company to make it seem authentic.

Figure 1. Phishing email sent to users

Figure 2. The Slingshot phishing site Slingshot [...]

PayPal Spam Warns of Fraud, Installs Worm Instead

A new fake PayPal email message is being spammed — this time, it is not the typical PayPal phishing email that everyone is accustomed to. Instead of including links asking for the recipient’s personal information, this spammed message asks users to open a .ZIP attachment. Here’s a sample email:

Figure 1. This supposed PayPal [...]

What really happened to the candidates’ computers?

Now that two weeks have passed since the end of the presidential campaigns, it is worthwhile to take a look at what I think should have one of the biggest cybercrime stories of the year. As Ryan blogged the day after the election, both the McCain and the Obama campaigns’ systems were compromised by [...]

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Commercial vendor of spyware under legal fire

Just like every decent marketer out there, vendors of commercial malware tools are very good at positioning their tools. However, their pitches often contradict with themselves in a way that what’s promoted as a Remote Administration Tool, has in fact built-in antivirus software evading capabilities, rootkit functionality and tutorials on how to remotely infect users [...]