Over the weekend, someone wrote to us complaining that Kaspersky Lab was sending spam. Naturally, this came as a bit of a surprise, seeing as how we do nothing of the sort; in fact we do quite the reverse: we combat spam. Of course, we wanted to find out why a user had come to the conclusion that Kaspersky Lab was sending spam to them.
The email that the user complained about had all the hallmarks of a typical online scam: behind the nice pictures reminiscent of Kaspersky Lab’s official advertising there was a link that had absolutely nothing in common with the company’s products. The cybercriminals had done a good job: the email not only looked like an official email from Kaspersky Lab but the “From” field was a good imitation as well.
After clicking the link, a user unwittingly ends up on a website with an offer to buy a program called Best Antivirus Online. It has to be said that the image of the “product box” on the web page was not unlike that of Symantec’s signature design – black font against a predominantly yellow background. To buy the program, the user had to enter their credit card details and email address so they could receive further instructions. We followed these step as part of our investigations, but received no more instructions at the email address we specified. It is quite possible that users could have received more instructions on how to download the fake antivirus at the time the spam was active.
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