Adobe Acrobat vulnerabilities: Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs also discovered two memory corruption vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader / Acrobat, which allow a remote attacker to compromise a system through a malicious document. The vulnerabilities are triggered when opening and rendering a PDF document. A remote attacker could craft a malicious document which exploits either one of these vulnerabilities, allowing them to compromise a system.

Ransomware and Scareware still top virus detection: This is no surprise, as Scareware has been consistently prevalent since September 2008. Ransomware, on the other hand, began making headway in 2010 due to incentives from affiliate-backed programs that pay out when victims purchase the fake products.

Cutwail spambot leveraged for money mule recruitment: Fortinet continues to observe the Cutwail spambot, which has been active for years, send various spam campaigns for its customers. The spam sent by Cutwail this month typically included malicious links to eCard binaries or emails with the binaries themselves attached. There were various money mule recruitment themes observed in spam emails this report, showing a growing demand for jobs on the black market.

“Money mules are essentially money laundering vehicles utilized by cyber criminals to handle and transfer illicit funds,” said Derek Manky, project manager, cyber security and threat research, Fortinet. “The mule receives a commission for doing the transfer. These transfers are typically done in batches of $10,000 USD or less. Money mule positions are, more times than not, crafted as legitimate sounding jobs, such as accounts receivable positions. If something seems too good to be true, it generally is.”

Another money mule campaign example can be found here: http://www.fortiguard.com/pics/threatscape1209/image-05b.png