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Beware of Malware in your Inbox

  

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I recently read an interesting article that described the latest bout of e-mail malware attacks.  The article explains that malware distributors are targeting people by indiscriminately sending out e-mails, en masse, with subject headings that contain some kind of juicy tidbit of celebrity gossip with the hope that users are enticed enough to open up the attachments that accompany these messages.

Of course, when someone gives in to their curiosity and decides to click on the attachment, which is often disguised as a .zip or .html file, an executable “downloader” file is opened up thereby paving the way for malware to be installed onto the newly infected machine. 

A recent blog posting courtesy of Appriver, a company specializing in e-mail and web security, mentions that similar to last year they are seeing a large increase in the amount of e-mails containing malware with the difference being that the increase is happening slightly earlier in 2010 than they did in 2009.  Appriver began to see these messages in the early hours on August 25^th and by the time that the blog was written the next day they had blocked more than 650,000 messages.

Here at BrandProtect, we’ve experienced an increase in malicious messages sent to us in the month of August.  Some of the messages were very creative; one such message contained very legitimate sounding text from what appeared to be a Banquet Hall asking for confirmation of a Wedding Contract, which was attached as a .zip file.  Another was from an online retail outlet which on the surface looked legitimate, complete with logos, a reference number and links to customer service and returns policy pages.  There was no attachment included in this instance but all of the hyperlinks in the body of the e-mail forwarded to malware.  Other, not so creative, messages were merely labelled “resume” and contained .html attachments.

Cyber criminals are becoming more and more innovative in their approach.  It falls on everyone’s shoulders to become aware of schemes like these because they are only going to get more sophisticated.  Education is the key to not becoming a victim.