Trusted research on email, mobile, web, and DNS security.
The recent detection of the Onliner spam botnet, which uses 80 million compromised email accounts to send spam to 711 million targets, is shocking in its size but not in the techniques used. Spammers have long used compromised email accounts to send spam. This avoids email filtering based on the source IP address. However, a […]
Cloudmark’s Annual Threat Report for 2015 is now available and covers the following topics: A look at how enterprises are trying to combat spear phishing and how well these attempts succeed or fail, according to a new survey of 300 companies How the Swizzor malware propagates by camouflaging itself to evade spam filters The risks for brands […]
During the course of a recent analysis of DNS traffic at a customer site, I noticed a high volume of requests had been made for a relatively small set of domains. As it turned out, the traffic was part of an attack on the customer’s DNS infrastructure; however, the point of these requests was initially […]
What does running the DNS infrastructure of a major ISP have in common with operating an online gambling site based in China? If you are running DNS operations of any scale then you are almost certainly participating in a world wide racketeering campaign specifically targeting online gambling sites, many of which operate out of China […]
Abuse of global DNS infrastructure for the purpose of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on various Internet services has been a hot topic in the news for some time now. But there is another unintended use of DNS that can be exploited for a wide range of purposes: DNS tunneling. These purposes can range from benign […]
The vendor area at Black Hat goes by the name of The Business Hall, and that sums it up. It is full of security companies, large and small, pitching their products in typical trade show fashion. The vendor area at Defcon is not like that. It is a jumble of vendors selling hacker equipment, lock […]
Spammers and attackers in both email and SMS were quick to redouble their efforts this quarter. In our 2014 Q2 Global Messaging Threat Report, we take a look at some of these various new trends popping up around the world. Comically, email phishers were quick to exploit the Heartbleed exploit without using the exploit. Deploying […]
April 12th is the 20th anniversary of the first large scale commercial spam – the infamous “Green Card Lawyers” message that was posted to every newsgroup on Usenet News (right). Though there were attempts at spamming starting as early as 1978, they went out to hundreds of users rather than the hundreds of thousands that […]
Every so often the command and control servers for a botnet get taken down, and we are told breathlessly by the more extravagant security experts that this botnet was responsible for a quarter (or a half or a third) or all the world’s spam, and that we can expect to see a big reduction in […]
Many service providers, network providers, and corporations plan to launch additional IPv6 networks and on-line services during this year’s World IPv6 Day, which falls on June 6th, 2012. IPv6 promises to enable deployment of a seemingly endless number of networks and devices. IPv6 provides 128-bits of addressable space, while IPv4 only provides 32-bits. This means […]
