We've been seeing a particular social engineering lure in spam runs in the past, where spammers leverage the death of a known celebrity or political figure. Recent examples of this include the death of Steve Jobs, and Amy Winehouse. In this spam run using Gadhafi’s death, however, a more compelling lure is being used to trick users into downloading malicious files.
We found several spammed messages that claim to lead to videos of Gadhafi’s death. It is important to note that ...
For some time now we've been reporting about Facebook scams involving surveys that ask for victims’ mobile numbers. These have become rampant, and have used many different lures like Google+ invites
and free Breaking Dawn Part 2 movie tickets.
Another good example is a Facebook page we recently encountered, one claiming to be a Starbucks promo page, and offering people free coffee. Clicking the link on the page opens a new browser window, which connects to a site that triggers a series ...
Even after a few weeks following Steve Jobs' death, spammers are still taking advantage of his demise. We have previously reported about this in the following blog entries:
Cybercriminals Remember Steve Jobs Through Facebook Scam
Steve Jobs Proclaimed Alive by Spam
This time, we received sample spammed messages promoting a supposed charity fund for young and gifted programmers and Web coders in honor of the late Apple co-founder.
Written in plain text, the said message aims to persuade recipients to donate funds ...
Lately, we have been seeing a renewed increase in the volume of spam attacks that utilize an exploit kit, specifically the BlackHole Exploit Kit to trigger a malicious payload. We have seen this in the latest slew of Automated Clearing House (ACH) spam attacks and the more recent spam run related to Steve Jobs's death.
In this post, we will reorient readers on the infection chain of such an attack to help them understand why basic mitigation practices are still ...
After tricking users into viewing ads through a Facebook scam, cybercriminals are again capitalizing on Steve Jobs's death through malicious spam.
We were able to find spam that contain the text, "Steve Jobs Alive" or "Steve Jobs Not Dead."
Another Steve Jobs-related spam we saw was written in Portuguese, which includes a short text about his death:
The text in the message above roughly translates to the following:
Subject: Creator of Steve Jobs of Apple's Mac, iPod and iPad dies
Steve Jobs, died of cancer ...
