MacBook Air Reward E-mails Drop Malware

Internet security company 'Trend Micro' has warned users about spam mails that are pretending to be messages from Media Service.

Threat analysts at the company state after studying the spam mail that while the e-mail uses the subject line, "Congratulations," Its text congratulates the recipient for winning the day's MacBook Air and urges him/her to read the details by opening a given attachment.

The attachment, as usual, doesn't contain any detail rather it carries a file with an 'exe' extension, named winner.exe, said analysts. Trend Micro has detected this file as TROJ_AGENT.AWYQ. Moreover when run, the Trojan plants another malicious program identified as TROJ_CUTWAIL.GO, the researchers state.

Trojan Cutwail, which is an extremely infamous spam botnet, dispatches 7.7 Million or so messages daily. Furthermore, it also downloads and executes random files on computers it infects. Additionally, TROJ_AGENT.AWYQ links up with mail servers, specifically Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo, through which it dispatches spam mails having embedded files carrying the malware.

According to Internet security specialists, when unsolicited e-mails make announcements or offers, the best defense is to verify their authenticity before getting swayed by them. These e-mails might have some spelling and/or grammatical errors that is a clear signal that users must delete them instantly.

During festival times such as Christmas and New Year, online shopping becomes particularly popular, therefore scammers are already looking for seizing personal information, without sparing any opportunity to defraud people as they try various methods for the purpose, said security experts.

Moreover, Apple's extremely thin MacBook Air is a highly desirable laptop globally, meaning that it isn't unnatural if criminals attempted to exploit its popularity as bait for infecting unwitting computer users, just like in the current spam campaign, hackers are spamming the MacBook-related malicious messages worldwide.

Meanwhile, F-Secure, another security company, is cautioning users of phishing e-mails which are trying to convince people that they must make their MySpace accounts up-to-date, a ruse that could enable the phishers to know users' login details. After taking control of the accounts, they use them to distribute malware.

Related article: MySpace Wants Apple To Update QuickTime

» SPAMfighter News - 12/4/2009