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Malicious social engineering on rise: report

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE,INDIA: Almost 85 per cent of emails generated in month of May were spam and 93 per cent of spam included an embedded URL, according to a new Webscence Email Security Threat Brief.

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The Webscence report which indicates increase in malicious social engineering activity also notes that there were 0.3 per cent of spam emails were phishing attacks.

According to the report, May month has been a witness to different tricks being used by hackers. The lures involving Facebook, iTunes, Amazon, Adobe, and even job applications were some examples, the report added.

Highlights:

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  • 84.7 per cent of all email was spam

  • 93 per cent of spam included an embedded URL

  • 204 thousand instances of 81 unique zero-day threats stopped by ThreatSeeker before AV

  • 0.3 per cent of spam emails were phishing attacks

The report notes that in early May, a campaign of malicious emails enticed users into installing a backdoor. The fruit of temptation was a Facebook toolbar which was spread via a link in the email; the link even led to a file named toolbar.exe. We also reported on a campaign of malicious attachment spam which claimed to be iTunes gift certificates. There were also messages from supposed job hunters which were sent out in a large email campaign which greeted the unfortunate victims with a rogue AV installation.

Lastly,the report points the detection of ever-present threat, Zeus, sending out a clever new campaign of emails. This particular campaign took great care in tricking victims into downloading malware.

It may be noted there that the Zeus messages contained a PDF attachment as well as a link to a malicious executable file in the email message. To make the messages more believable, the attackers made it look like forwarded mail from a security director within your company which explained that Adobe Reader needed to be updated.

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