Be warned: It’s the 4th of July
Be warned: It’s the 4th of July
July 4, 2007: An malicious spam email playing off the back of America’s Day of Independence is wreaking havoc on inboxes across Australia.
According the security vendor Marshal, their TRACE team has identified the new run of Green Card style spam inviting recipient to retrieve the card a mystery family member or friend has said.
By clicking on the message, the recipient is exposed to copy of the Storm Trojan in the executable file named ‘ecard.exe’ with the potential to the user’s PC and merge it into a botnet.
Marshal says the Storm Trojan first appeared in January 2007 and has since gained quick success and notoriety by infamously using current affairs headlines to fool recipients into opening the necessary attachment. Besides today’s 4th of July message, similar malicious emails have contained headlines like, ‘Chinese missile shot down by USA aircraft.’
Bradley Anstis, director of product management at Marshal, says today’s run of the Storm Trojan is using the 4th of July hook to continue its theme of exploiting current events to entice unsuspecting recipients.
“We all enjoy receiving messages on special days like Valentine’s Day and Christmas,” says Anstis. “On these days our guard comes down and we sometimes open messages that we would otherwise treat with caution on any other day.
“Our advice to anyone who receives a message like this from a person they do not know, or have not heard from for a long time is to delete it without opening it. Certainly, don’t click on the link in the message and don’t click “OK” if it asks to download a file,” says Anstis.