Massive Stock Spam Attack Uses PDF to Lure Investors
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Some five billion spam messages have been sent to recipients using a first-ever, professionally-looking PDF file that advertised a German stock scam.
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(InfoWorld) - The Securities and Exchange Commission has taken the drastic step of suspending trading in shares of 35 companies whose stocks have frequently been touted in mass spam campaigns. SEC officials said on Feb. 8 that the firms involved -- none of which are household names -- have been the subject of repeated spam efforts meant to drive up trading of their securities and, subsequently, the value of the companies themselves. The trading bans will last for 10 days, after which shares in the involved companies will be unlocked -- unless the SEC's ongoing investigation proves any of the firms were involved in the e-mail schemes. While the ban might seem unfair to the businesses involved, especially if their names and securities were merely selected by scammers looking for penny stocks to inflate in so-called pump-and-dump operations, SEC officials said that in each business's case, there were sufficient questions raised regarding the "adequacy and accuracy" of information being advertised about the companies. Criminals have increasingly begun using spam to drive up interest in cheap stocks over the last several years. Before sending out mass messages about a specific firm, the individuals buy stock in the companies in the expectation that, with their e-mails, they can convince other people to purchase shares. When prices of the shares involved rise, the schemers sell off their own holdings, thus the pump-and-dump moniker. The spam messages, which often feature subject lines such as "Fast Money," have become one of the types of unwanted e-mail most frequently delivered to inboxes over the last year, alongside advertisements for prescription medications. Whenever misleading information is being widely distributed about a firm whose securities are traded, the SEC takes such actions, an agency representative said. "All we can say is that we suspend trading any time we think misinformation about specific securities is being reported," said Helene Glotzer, an SEC spokeswoman. "We're not making a statement that these companies themselves were behind the misstatements, but if the information is out there we feel it is important to let the investing public know; we'll continue our investigation, and if it is appropriate to take action against any of the companies, that is what we will do." The suspensions are part of an SEC initiative known as Operation Spamalot, which was launched specifically to shield investors from spam e-mail "hyping" small company stocks. SEC officials said that anyone who has received such e-mail will recognize the names of the companies who were suspended, as they are among the most frequently cited businesses in securities-related spam campaigns. The messages typically advertise some new product or impending deal that will increase the value of the companies and encourage investors to buy their low-priced securities, which are usually penny stocks. For instance, among the companies whose shares were suspended is Apparel Manufacturing Associates, a Bloomfield, Conn.-based firm that markets itself as a management and development company focused on the fashion arena. The SEC said that on Friday, Dec. 15, 2006, shares in Apparel Manufacturing closed at 6 cents, on a trading volume of 3,500 shares. After a weekend-long spam campaign using e-mails about the company advertising "huge news" that encouraged investors to "get in before the wire," trading volume in the stock rose to 484,568 shares on Monday, Dec. 18, with the price of the stock rising to more than 19 cents a share. The agency said that two days later the price had climbed to 45 cents per share, but one week after, Apparel Manufacturing's share price had fallen to 10 cents on trading volume of 65,350 shares. Calls to the company seeking comment on the stock suspension were not immediately returned. If the SEC investigation finds no link between the companies involved and the spam campaigns, their shares will be released for trading on March 21, 2007. SEC officials noted that the suspensions were all handed out to companies that are not subject to the SEC reporting requirements and whose shares are not listed on any exchange or on the OTC Bulletin Board. This means that brokers posting quotations for the purchase and sale of the securities are not required to conduct due diligence regarding the issuers, according to the agency. The 35 companies whose trading was suspended by the SEC are: Advanced Powerline Technologies, America Asia Petroleum, Amerossi International Group, Apparel Manufacturing Associates, Asgard Holdings, Biogenerics, China Gold, CTR Investments & Consulting, DC Brands International, Equal Trading, Equitable Mining, Espion International, Goldmark Industries, GroFeed, Healtheuniverse, Interlink Global, Investigative Services Agencies, iPackets International, Koko Petroleum, Leatt Corporation, LOM Logistics, Modern Energy, National Healthcare Logistics, Presidents Financial, Red Truck Entertainment, Relay Capital, Rodedawg International Industries, Rouchon Industries, Software Effective Solutions, Solucorp Industries, Sports-stuff.com, UBA Technology, Wataire Industries, WayPoint Biomedical Holdings, and Wineco Productions.
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How to outmaneuver the wizards of Wall Street.
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Just when you thought that financial couldn't get more exciting here comes the SEC with a cool new AJAX-y site to view filings
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A security researcher demonstrates a way to use cross site scripting to remotely spam an internal network printer.
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Pump-and-dump spam designed to look like investment newsletter pushed German stock, trading volume grew by 20 percent.
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(InfoWorld) - "Ed," a retired spammer, built a considerable fortune sending e-mails that promoted pills, porn, and casinos. At the peak of his power, Ed says he pulled in $10,000 to $15,000 a week, storing the money in $20 bills in stacks of boxes. It was a life of greed and excess, one that preyed especially on vulnerable people hoping to score drugs or win money gambling on the Internet. From when he was expelled from high school at 17 until he quit his spam career at 22, Ed -- who does not reveal his full name but sometimes goes by SpammerX -- was part of an electronic underworld profiting from the Internet via spam. "Yes, I know I'm going to hell," said Ed, who spoke in London on Wednesday at an event hosted by IronPort Systems, a security vendor now owned by Cisco Systems. "I'm actually a really nice guy. Trust me." A quick-witted and affable guy who wears an earring and casual clothes, there was a time when Ed wasn't so nice. He sent spam to recovering gambling addicts enticing them to gambling Web sites. He used e-mail addresses of people known to have bought antianxiety medication or antidepressants and targeted them with pharmaceutical spam. In short, Ed said he was "basically what people hate about the Internet." He spent 10 hours a day, seven days a week studying how to send spam and avoid filtering technologies in security software designed to weed out garbage e-mail. Most spam filters are effective 99 percent of the time; he aimed for that remaining window, using tricks such as including slightly different images in his spam, which can fool filters into thinking the e-mail is legitimate. "The better I got at spam, the more money I made," Ed said. He would start a spam run by finding an online merchant who wanted to sell a product. Then he'd acquire a list of e-mail addresses -- another commodity that has spawned its own market in the world of spam. He'd also set up a domain name, included as a link in a spam message, that, if clicked, would redirect the recipient to the merchant's Web site, enabling Ed to get credit for the referral. The spam would then be sent from a network of hacker-controlled computers, called botnets. Those machines are often consumer PCs infected with malicious software that a hacker can control. Ed would "rent" time on those computers from another group of hackers that specialized in creating botnets. If one of the spam recipients bought something, Ed would get a percentage of the sale. For pharmaceuticals the commission was around 50 percent, he said. Response rates to spam tend to be a fraction of 1 percent. But Ed said he once got a 30 percent response rate for a campaign. The product? A niche type of adult entertainment: photos of fully clothed women popping balloons. To track the money, merchants set up a "referral sales page" where spammers can see how much they make from a spam run. Ed would log in frequently, watching the money increase. He was paid into electronic payment transfer accounts, such as e-gold or PayPal, or into his debit card account, which he could cash out in $20 bills. That became problematic when the cash became voluminous. He says he made $480,000 his last year of spamming. But the lifestyle of being a spammer was taking a toll. In essence, he had no life. It's hard to go into a bar and explain your job to a woman by saying "I advertise penis enlargement pills online," Ed said. "It doesn't go down very well." He rationalized his actions by saying spamming is not like robbing someone, although the lurid impact of spam was clear. Some nine million Americans have some dependence on prescription drugs, Ed said, and he noticed that the same people were buying different drugs each month. "These were addicts," he said. Additionally, "the product is always counterfeit to some degree. If you're lucky, sometimes it's a diluted version of the real thing," he said. Viagra is cut with amphetamines, and homemade pills are common from sketchy labs in countries such as China, India, and Fiji, Ed said. So Ed got out of the business. He's written a book, "Inside the Spam Cartel: Trade Secrets from the Dark Side," which he said has had some take-up inÂ law enforcement circlesÂ eager to learn more about the spam business, which he projects will only get worse. As broadband speeds increase, spammers will increasingly look to market goods by making VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) calls or sending out videos, Ed said. The ultimate unsolvable problem is users, who continue to buy products marketed by spam, making the industry possible. "I think in 10 years we'll still get spam," Ed said. "Be prepared to be bombarded." Â
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The Russian Business Network, a notorious hacker gang, is responsible for ongoing spam attacks using malicious PDF files.
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Application that claimed to "spam the spammers" caused much controversy.
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Eleven people, including one of the top spammers in the world, were indicted on Thursday for allegedly sending millions of unsolicited e-mails intended to inflate the price of Chinese penny stocks.The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) called the scheme one of the largest spamming and fraud operations in the U.S. The 41-count indictment charges the defendants with conspiracy, several types of fraud, and money laundering.The indictment alleges the group sent spam via botnets, or networks of hacked computers. A three-year investigation revealed the e-mails, which implored investors to buy cheap stocks, contained fake headers and other misleading information, the DOJ said.After the price of a stock increased, the defendants sold at the artificially inflated price, a practice known as a&#160;pump-and-dump&#160;scam, according to the indictment. In mid-2005, the stock spam netted the defendants around $3 million, the DOJ said.Those charged include Alan M. Ralsky, 52, of West Bloomfield, Michigan. Spamhaus, a London-based organization that tracks spamming operations, listed&#160;Ralsky as one of the top professional spammers&#160;in the world. Also indicted was Ralsky&#39;s son-in-law, Scott K. Bradley, 46.Ralsky settled with Verizon after being sued in 2002 over spam. Ralsky and his company, Additional Benefits, agreed to pay Verizon and to stop sending spam on Verizon&#39;s network.Three of the 11 accused have been detained, and the rest -- including Ralsky -- are being sought, the DOJ said.
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A screensaver targeting spam-related websites could help drive spammers out of business.
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Legitimate mortgage lenders inadvertently support--and get tangled in--spam traps.
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Junk e-mailers are using free Web pages to disguise spam sources, manipulate search engines.
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The vendor adds to its growing list of spam lawsuits one aimed at a service provider that hosts spammers. By Thomas Claburn. Cheapbulletproof.
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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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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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EXPERTS at SophosLabs, Sophos' global network of virus, spyware and spam analysis centres, have identified a "pump-and-dump" stock spam campaign which uses an animated graphic to display a "subliminal" message to potential investors.