Gail On Tech

Security updates

Here are some of the latest developments in the security space this week:

From Trend Micro

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From AVG

AVG is warning Twitter users that they should protect themselves from online spammers who have begun to capitalise on the proliferation of compressed URLs used on the Twitter platform — Twitter users are limited to 140 characters for each ‘tweet’, so getting a URL as short as possible is important.

According to AVG’s marketing manager for Australia and New Zealand, Lloyd Borrett, these tiny URLs can mask suspect links. “AVG LinkScanner offers users the best defence against the use of small URL links to obfuscate poisoined links on Twitter and in emails”, Borrett said.

From Symantec

Here are the main observations from Symantec’s State of Spam Report for the Asia-Pacific region in the month of June:
* Since Michael Jackson’s death, several related spam and malware campaigns have taken shape.
* Spammers utilised the 4th of July holiday in the US to deliver some of their most malicious campaigns.
* The trend of spammers using attachment images to get the attention of certain email users continued to be a top spam threat’

Symantec’s July Phishing Report observed the following phishing trends in the month of June:
* An overall increase of 21% in phishing attacks compared to May.
* The number of phishing URLs generating using automated phishing toolkits increased by 9%. There was a sudden increase in toolkit attacks during the last week of June, largely due to phishers targeting popular social networking sites.
* A significant increase in the number of free Web hosting services used for developing phishing sites, which accounted for 10% of all phishing attacks — a staggering 96% increase compared to May.
* A new technique used in phishing scams targeting the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) where intended victims were asked to supply personal financial details and print a form.
* A wave of fake Twitter invitations carrying a mass-mailing worm.

You can read the complete State of Spam report here and the Phishing Report here.

From MessageLabs

MessageLabs also observed a sharp increase in the use of shortened URLs by spammers as described above, with the incidence skyrocketing over just a couple of days to account for more than 2% of all spam. With many social networking sites providing character restrictions on status updates and messages, the use of free URL redirection services, which turn lengthy Web addresses into shortened URLs, is increasing in popularity with spammers for multiple reasons.
“There are literally dozens of Web sites that offer URL shortening services and spammers have realised that using these services eliminates the need to solve a CAPTCHA or register an account,” said Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst, Symantec. “The newly shortened URLs also help cybercriminals disguise the true destination of where their victims will click through to, posing further risks of entering Web sites used to conducting drive-by malware attacks as well as spam. Donbot, the botnet responsible for sending approximately 5 billion spam messages every day, is one of the main culprits for using this technique. Links of any size all need to be treated with caution.”