Pharmaceutical scammers launch their own Web contest

Pharmaceutical scammers launch their own Web contest

What are pharmaceutical scammers up to? From active participation in black hat search engine optimization campaigns, to spamvertising of bogus links — including QR Codes — and compromising of web sites with high page rank in order to redirect to pharmaceutical scams, scammers are keeping themselves pretty busy in order to monetize as much web traffic as possible.

Recently, one of the most popular affiliate network for selling counterfeit pharmaceutical items launched its own Web contest.

Let’s take a look.

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Researchers spot Citadel, a ZeuS crimeware variant

Researchers spot Citadel, a ZeuS crimeware variant

Security researchers from “Tracking Cyber Crime” have spotted a new ZeuS crimeware variant, that’s based on the leaked ZeuS source code from last year.

Dubbed Citadel, the crimeware is positioned as a universal spyware system, whose modular nature allows cybercriminals to offer flexibly priced value-added services such as managed malware crypting, and managed web injects as a service.

Some of Citadel’s core features include:

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A peek inside the Smoke Malware Loader

A peek inside the Smoke Malware Loader

The competitive arms race between security vendors and malicious cybercriminals constantly produces new defensive mechanisms, next to new attack platforms and malicious tools aiming to efficiently exploit and infect as many people as possible.

Continuing the “A peek inside…” series, in this post I will profile yet another malware loader. This time it’s the Smoke Malware Loader.

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Research: Google’s reCAPTCHA under fire

Research: Google’s reCAPTCHA under fire

Who needs automated bots solving CAPTCHAs, when you have teams of low-waged humans recognizing them for pennies?

In an underground cybercrime ecosystem dominated by managed services and countless outsourcing opportunities, it’s fairly logical to assume that Google’s reCAPTCHA is under constant fire.

Just how easy is it to recognize reCAPTCHA images for malicious account registration and service abuse purposes? Let’s find out.

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