Trend Micro Detects New Spam Campaign

According to Trend Micro security experts, spammers continue to launch their campaigns with attached malicious PDFs.

As reported, Trend Micro researchers got to know about the suspicious e-mail that claims to be an IT warning. It (email) informs users that their mailbox settings have been changed. Moreover, there is a .PDF attachment in this e-mail that allegedly has the instructions for the users to follow before resetting their settings.

Trend Micro noted that it has come across similar attacks earlier also which seemed to be launched by a genuine sender and appeared like a notification from a semi-legitimate firm. Cybercriminals look forward to give a more original look to their malicious e-mail, luring recipients to open the .PDF attachment.

While commenting on this spiteful spam campaign, security experts at Trend Micro said that this .PDF file makes the script batscript.vbs on execution. It drops and executes a component of the worm called game.exe. game.exe also carries bp.sys, the rootkit file, to probably conceal its nasty acts and to defend itself from getting noticed by the user, according to a statement published by pc1news.com on April 28, 2010.

Experts also said that cyber criminals and spammers are becoming much more creative in conceptualizing and then executing their malicious campaigns. As a result, they urge users to be very vigilant and to secure their systems to stop cyber crooks benefitting from their malicious acts.

As a matter of fact, some simple instructions, if followed, may thwart bogus e-mails. Firstly, users must be alert while opening an e-mail which looks dubious by its title or by its sender, particularly if there is an attachment embedded in the e-mail. Scanning the attachment via anti-virus solution before clicking on it is a good security practice.

Secondly, users must install the most recent and advanced version of anti-spyware, anti-virus, and Internet firewall program. Then, keeping Windows security patches updated via an automatic update feature is must. To do this, a user shall first go to Control Panel, then Security Center, and then click Turn on Automatic Updates.

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

» SPAMfighter News - 5/8/2010