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AppRiver Warns Of Hostile Spam Run Carrying Html Attachments

Security investigators from AppRiver a security company are cautioning that spam mails have been profusely targeting the inboxes of innocent users with malevolent HTML files as attachments during the 3rd week of September 2010.

Observes the security company, a rapid change is occurring in the spurious e-mails' subject lines along with their attachments' file names. A few of the headers are "Apartment for rent," "Randolph Plans," "Credit card," "Church of Body Modification" or "Cops kill active shooter at John Hopkins Hospital."

Still more are "America's Got Talent Judges Were They Shocked By," "Hospital violence on the rise, agency warns" and "NFL Picks Week 2."

Says AppRiver, from the above headers it appears that spammers probably are utilizing a crawler for picking captions out of news as well as advertisement websites.

In addition, AppRiver highlighted that there were 15 to 20 separate headers accompanying the HTMLs on just September 16, 2010. Nevertheless, this count contrasted that of the August 2010 count when the campaign first started with one spam mail dispatched on each occasion until the spammers became sure that the target users had installed software signatures, prior to resuming with the campaign.

At another security company Sophos too, the researchers studied the spam scheme following which they warned that users who'd view any e-mail from the campaign would find themselves diverted onto websites that carried malicious software. The company reportedly examined a pair of spurious e-mails having malevolent attachments.

In case these attachments were clicked they'd install the HTML documents on the web-browser existing by default and execute a malicious JavaScript. The JavaScript forcibly takes the user onto one remote website that displays a "please wait" message before diverting him again after a few moments. Moreover, the website on which the user is redirected has a compromised lawful site as its host.

Ultimately, Web-surfers land on a site that exhibits a bogus AV scan and tries to convince them that their PCs are infected with malware.

Thus, to remain safe from the current malicious spam run, security specialists recommend that users should be particularly cautious when opening electronic mails having attachments.

Related article: AppRiver Reports Security Trends for November 2008

» SPAMfighter News - 9/30/2010

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