Massive stock spam attack uses crafty PDF to lure investors
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A massive "pump and dump" stock scam spam attack was launched yesterday, sending out as many as 5 billion messages touting a German stock to recipients worldwide.
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The Storm Worm botnet network may be shrinking in size, but it has managed to send out 15 million of those annoying audio spam messages in October, according to anti-spam vendor MessageLabs.It&#39;s hard to believe that the Storm messages were effective. Recipients had to first click on an attachment -- usually given a misleading name&#160;such as&#160;beatles.mp3 or Britney.mp3 -- to hear the stock pitch, which featured a warbly robotic woman advising people to invest in online car seller, Exit Only.This kind of scam, called &quot;pump and dump,&quot; tries to nudge up the price of penny stocks by a cent or two, giving the spammers a way to make a quick buck by selling the stock before it crashes. Spammers have been delivering their messages in different formats, including&#160;PDF and Excel files, over the past few years as part of a cat-and-mouse game with spam blockers. This&#160;move to MP3 spam&#160;is the latest development in this battle, observers say.Spam watchers say that pump-and-dump schemes are the hottest and most lucrative area for spammers today.The spam run began on Oct. 17, and lasted about 36 hours, using infected computers in the Storm Worm network to send out the mails, MessageLabs said in a statement released Tuesday. The spam sounded strange and warbly because the voice in the message was &quot;synthesized using a very low compression rate of 16KHz to keep the overall file size small, at around 50KB, to avoid detection,&quot; the company said.Storm is thought to have landed on as many as 15 million PCs over the past year, but recently&#160;its network of infected PCs has been shrinking. University of California, San Diego, researchers recently pegged it at about 160,000 computers, only 20,000 of which are accessible at any one time.Exit Only said it was not involved in sending the spam. Its stock was trading around $0.41 on Oct. 18, the day after the Storm spam started. On Tuesday it closed at $0.20.
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Technology company Pegasus Wireless announced an unusual plan for investors to receive what the company described as a stock warrant for every 10 shares of stock. But there was a catch. But there was a catch.
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New round of 'family member' greeting-card spam tricks recipients into visiting malicious Web sites.
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The flaws disclosed last week in Adobe System&#39;s Reader and Acrobat programs have been used to exploit computers since at least January via malicious banner advertisements, security analysts are reporting.Adobe issued patches&#160;last Wednesday for Reader and Acrobat, but the company did not detail the flaws.Problems with Adobe&#39;s software can potentially affect millions of PC users, since the company&#39;s software is widely used to read PDF (Portable Document Format) files. Most people regard PDFs as harmless.&quot;From our standpoint, it appears that this PDF-based attack has been quite successful, affecting many thousands of users throughout the world,&quot; wrote Hon Lau on Symantec&#39;s Security Response Weblog.Greg McManus of iDefense Labs, the security arm of VeriSign, reported one of the vulnerabilities to Adobe in October, according to a post by the SANS Institute, a computer security organization.Since hackers have been apparently using the Adobe flaws since January, it raises the question how they discovered the flaw.Lau wrote that the &quot;swiftness of the exploit appearing in the wild suggests that leaks had occurred.&quot;However, it appears that the vulnerabilities in Reader and Acrobat were disclosed in a responsible way, Lau wrote.The flaws in the programs allow a hacker to create a malicious PDF document. If opened by a victim, that document downloads a malicious Trojan that Symantec calls &quot;Zonebac.&quot;Zonebac was first detected in 2006. It shuts off a user&#39;s security software as well as downloads other bad software. The latest version also appears to taint search engine results, Lau wrote.In January, iDefense noticed that the malicious PDF document was being delivered through malicious banner advertisements. Symantec&#39;s Lau wrote that it&#39;s not immediately clear how the PDF file is delivered, but that the banner ads could be redirecting people to other harmful Web sites with the file. Also, spam messages may be carrying the bad file as an attachment.Malicious banner ads can be particularly dangerous since the ads can show up on legitimate Web sites. Online advertising companies have struggled to keep these ads off their networks. Sometimes, hackers will approach the networks with what is a legitimate ad and then substitute it for a malicious one. Many of those bad ads have exploited vulnerabilities in Adobe&#39;s Flash multimedia technology.Adobe&#39;s Reader and Acrobat are designed to regularly look for updates, but users are advised to upgrade to the patched version, 8.1.2.&#160;
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Fuzzy PDF menace Spammers have turned a widely-used anti-spam trick - fuzzy text that computers cannot recognise - to their own advantage, according to the head of an anti-spam software developer.â¦
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Edgy investors take the stock for a bumpy ride.
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AN ISP CALLED Lycos has come up with a way of fighting spam that attacks the spammers servers. All you have to do is load a screensaver - &quot;Make Love Not Spam&quot; - available from Lycos Europe and it will requests
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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission says the companies allegedly benefited from spam e-mail campaigns to hype their stocks.
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Duff note Stock spammers have abandoned PDF files and image spam with a new campaign featuring MP3 files.â¦
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Blog: The most serious involves poisoned PDF files. The update also includes patches for Bind, Fetchmail, and GNU Screen.
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Investing: Taming China's Dragon Market
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The real reason your stocks may be killing you.
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This stock will haunt your dreams if it's in your portfolio.
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Legitimate mortgage lenders inadvertently support--and get tangled in--spam traps.
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Here's how to beef up your portfolio and beat the market.
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PDF attack prompts round-the-clock patch fest Escalating attacks exploiting a serious weakness in PDF files have prompted Microsoft to issue an all-hands-on-deck call to fix a vulnerability that lurks in the bowels of Windows XP.â¦