The Russian-headquartered IT security firm says that hackers in Brazil are phishing for miles from frequent fliers, both as a means of buying flights - without actually paying for them - but also as a form of online currency.
In one IRC message, Kaspersky reports that a cybercriminal was selling access to a Brazilian botnet that sends spam in exchange for 60,000 flight miles, whilst in another message air miles were offered for stolen credit cards.
In parallel with this developer comes news that the ZitMo man-in-the-mobile trojan was seen hitting users' PCs in volume during July. As previously noted by Infosecurity, ZitMo is notable for its ability to steal TANs - transaction authentication numbers – which are sent to online banking users to allow them to authorise each banking transaction.
In the case of the mobile version of ZitMo, Kaspersky says that the malware has already been detected running on Symbian, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry platforms, and has recently added Android devices to its list.
And it's not just antivirus vendors who are giving cybercriminals a hard time, as last month saw Google excluding more than 11 million URLs with *.co.cc addresses from its search results.
The `blocked' domain zone is among the largest globally, ranking fourth after .com, .de and .net in terms of registered domain names, says Kaspersky, adding that, in most cases the domains’ URLs are used by cybercriminals to spread rogue antivirus programs or conduct drive-by attacks.
However, Kaspersky adds, it is difficult to say how successful Google’s campaign has been - there are indeed fewer cybercriminals using the .co.cc domains, but they have merely started using the services of other domain zone registrars.
Also during July, says the security vendor, drive-by-download attacks remained one of the most popular methods of infecting users’ computers with malicious programs.
Every month, the vendor adds new entries that facilitate such attacks – redirectors, script downloaders and exploits – appear in the Top 20 malicious programs on the imternet. There were a total of 11 seen during July, notes Kaspersky's latest monthly report.