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Trend Micro - Terra Spam Infects Users’ PCs with Banker Trojan

Researchers at security firm Trend Micro have reported that spammers are targeting 'Terra,' the portal site of Brazil, to distribute spam mails to the site's e-mail account owners.

The unsolicited e-mails, which are written in the Portuguese language, say that there is a message from someone to the recipient that he could access together with some photographs by clicking on the given link.

A note too appears below the main message that says that a scan has been done for the message with security software. However, as expected, while the e-mail attempts to convince users that there is no malware in the e-mail, the reality is something different.

On clicking the link, a corrupt file called "AlbumPicasa.scr" is downloaded that Trend Micro detected as TROJ_DLOADR.VIA.

The researchers said that the Trojan works by connecting to URLs in order to download files online, named "rootx.exe" and "WindowsUpdate.exe," which are variants of TROJ_BANKER and TRPJ_DLOADR respectively.

The BANKER variants, which attempt to rob passwords to gain illegal access to Internet banking, can be found greatly in the countries of Latin America, where online banking is considered a highly convenient utility and which cyber criminals do not miss to exploit in their own way.

Thus, the security specialists stated that people must always remember that Internet banking is not only extremely convenient for the common users but also very useful for e-mail spammers. Hence, people must always be vigilant and maintain up-to-date spam filters and antivirus software.

Meanwhile, the particular spam mail provides another link that gives an option to recipients who might not like to get anymore of such e-mails in future. Accordingly, if they click on it, their e-mail ID would be removed from the list, the e-mail notes. Nonetheless, this is another trick of the cyber criminals to make their messages sound reliable.

The security researchers also state that the above ruse is rather unusual as these kinds of attacks normally target the better-known international portals like Google and Yahoo. Thus, the latest incident shows that just because an Internet site is not very popular, it is not necessary that spammers wouldn't target it.

Related article: Trend Micro Detects Spam Mail Declaring World War III

» SPAMfighter News - 5/6/2009

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