Security News
Phishers, scammers and malware peddlers are ready to take advantage of the summer holiday season: According to Bitdefender security analysts, the deluge of travel-themed spam has started in March and is expected to reach its peak in June. Security analyst Alina Bizga told Help Net Security that they haven't seen any really sophisticated travel-themed scams, phishing or attempts at impersonating popular booking platforms as they have seen in the past, but that the summer holiday season is just starting.
A new wave of phishing campaigns has been observed spreading a previously documented malware called SVCReady. "The malware is notable for the unusual way it is delivered to target PCs - using shellcode hidden in the properties of Microsoft Office documents," Patrick Schläpfer, a threat analyst at HP, said in a technical write-up.
Researchers have identified a never-before-seen method for sneaking malicious links into email inboxes. The clever trick takes advantage of a key difference in how email inboxes and browsers read URLs, according a Monday report by Perception Point.
The BBC were the target of nearly 50 million malicious email attacks between 1st October 2021 and the end of January 2022. This means the BBC is facing an average of 383,278 email threats a day, which is a 35 per cent increase from the daily figure of 283,597 email attacks blocked per day observed by Parliament Street in Summer 2020.
A persuasive and ongoing series of phishing attacks are using fake Office 365 notifications asking the recipients to review blocked spam messages, with the end goal of stealing their Microsoft credentials. Instead of reaching the Office 365 portal when clicking the 'Review' button, they are sent to a phishing landing page that will ask them to enter their Microsoft credentials to access the quarantined spam messages.
Threat actors are exploiting ProxyLogon and ProxyShell exploits in unpatched Microsoft Exchange Servers as part of an ongoing spam campaign that leverages stolen email chains to bypass security software and deploy malware on vulnerable systems. ProxyLogon and ProxyShell refer to a collection of flaws in Microsoft Exchange Servers that could enable a threat actor to elevate privileges and remotely execute arbitrary code, effectively granting the ability to take control of the vulnerable machines.
In January 2021, law enforcement and judicial authorities worldwide moved together to perform a global takedown of the Emotet botnet, and in April 2021 they performed a coordinated, widespread uninstall of the malware from infected machines via a module they propagated in January, effectively crippling the botnet. According to the researchers, whoever is trying to bring the Emotet botnet back online has started by using the Trickbot botnet to drop the malware, and then added the tried and tested method of sending spam with attachments and links to it.
The Emotet malware kicked into action yesterday after a ten-month hiatus with multiple spam campaigns delivering malicious documents to mailboxes worldwide. Emotet is a malware infection that is distributed through spam campaigns with malicious attachments.
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has admitted that a software misconfiguration let parties unknown send email from its servers. A statement from the Bureau, dated November 14th, states that the agency "Is aware of a software misconfiguration that temporarily allowed an actor to leverage the Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal to send fake emails".
Signal has added an easy way for users to report and block spam straight from message request screens with a single mouse click. Message requests were added to Signal last year, in August 2020, to allow new users to reach out to other Signal users even if they're not in their address books and provide more contextual info to those on the receiving end.