Cyber-Criminals Currently Phishing for Frequent Flier Points

Kaspersky Lab the IT security company headquartered in Russia has just released its July 2011 malware report according to which, cyber-criminals are dispatching phishing e-mails to deceptively collect frequent flier points since these act as precious electronic money through which flight miles can be bought.

Specifically, according to the company, Brazilian phishers are trying to steal frequent fliers' miles so they can purchase air tickets for cheap or for no price whatsoever, while the miles serve as an Internet currency.

Citing a particular IRC message, Kaspersky says that an online crook was found selling one Brazilian botnet's service for distributing spam at a price of 60,000 flier points, while according to another message, stolen details of credit cards were obtainable in exchange of frequent flier miles.

Amazingly, the new monthly report's discoveries during July 2011 shows that it weren't simply security software suppliers that put cyber-criminals in grave trouble, since Google isolated over 11m URLs having the ".co.cc" suffix from amongst the returns the search engine produced during the month. The barred .co.cc domain name is used extremely frequently worldwide, as it occupies the 4th spot following .com, .de and .net, which are the other most registered domains, states Kaspersky. Additionally, the company states that often cyber-criminals utilize the domains' web addresses for carrying out drive-by assaults or for disseminating scareware products.

Furthermore, according to the report, since several months now, the twenty most-prevalent malware items spotted on end-users' PCs practically continued to be the same, whilst Kaspersky in a different malware rating has shown new entries routinely occurring. Accordingly, in July 2011, 60% of the malware items within the second malware-rating happened to be fresh that was owing to innumerable malevolent codes, which were located on remote servers cyber-crooks routinely updated.

Meanwhile, computer viruses like Sality and worms like Kido were highly prevalent on end-users' PCs within the rating of twenty most-widespread malware programs. But, as per the report, anti-virus solutions can miss detecting these programs over a long time, while they're currently continuously attempting at contaminating other PCs through detachable devices or network files that'll kick start anti-virus security incase loaded.

Related article: Cyber Child abuser Sentenced To Imprisonment

» SPAMfighter News - 8/22/2011