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The holiday season is upon us, bringing excitement (and presents) for kids of all ages. Naturally, cybercriminals are abusing the spirit of giving for their own evil ends. We’re seeing typical spam – weight loss, financial scams, and pharmacy offers – wrapped in the Christmas spirit. First off – there

It’s been a while since we’ve seen these – but they are so pretty and creative that we feel obliged to write about them. We are referring to ASCII art spam emails. ASCII art (for those who don’t know how to open nfo files) uses cleverly arranged standard keyboard characters

Each year since 2008, we have selected an organization that is making a difference in the world to receive a holiday donation on behalf of our customers, partners and friends. This year we have chosen Acumen Fund:  …a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems

Recently I returned from the Association of Anti-Virus Asia Researchers (AVAR 2010) conference in Bali, Indonesia, where I got the chance to learn and discuss the latest threats with the colleagues in the antivirus industry, and how to improve our tools and mechanisms to keep up with the challenges we

We detected a new email run of malware and released definition files for it. We call it W32/Trojan2.NLUQ. The email is a bit unusual in its presentation.   It grabs scripts and graphics from the Hallmark page which it will display in your email client. All of the clickable links in

This title of this email caught our eye – “privacy” – certainly an amusing way to introduce spam. Closer inspection revealed two interesting tricks, no doubt intended to fool content-based spam filters.  The first is the use of almost invisible, random text to break up words which might be detected

The theoretical answer to that question is quite complex but involves a definition like this: “Protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information”. This is a nice definition that ends up conveying a significant amount of information without meaning much at all.  I am a pragmatist: I need to model

Since this is my second post on the Commtouch blog I have added a brief intro – I have been working in the antivirus industry since 2004. I’ve served as an Escalation Anti-Virus Engineer at Trend Micro, Inc., a Senior Anti-Malware Analyst at F-Secure, Inc., and currently work as a

We received this email from a friend and immediately suspected that his Yahoo account had been compromised. The subject was clearly not generated by a human and the email contained a single link with some garbled text.  Following the link brought us to some exciting special price meds just in