E-mail Spam Asserts Death of Romanian President

BitDefender the security company says that a new e-mail scam is circulating online as it seemingly abuses Traian Basescu name of the President of Romania.

The company released the details of the scam saying that the spam messages inform readers that the President of Romania has just died.

But when the spam mails are opened, recipients find that the news in them is wholly a fake, while their PCs become contaminated with an especially malicious malware sample. This malware, a PC virus dubbed Dropped:Trojan.Fakealert.13085 represents the family of strong keystroke loggers that steals credit card information and password from the victims.

Interestingly, in this spam attack, the fraudsters impersonate the domain name of Antena 3's e-mail, where Antena 3 is Romania's widely watched TV station, thereby making the message seem real.

And as these kinds of scams get very frequent online, Catalin Cosoi head of Online Threat Labs of BitDefender explains that cyber-criminals' utilization of sensational stories and famous personalities as lure to take down malicious software is a widely adopted trick. Furthermore, he emphasizes the way social engineering applied to a scam frequently works out as the prime thing for the scam's failure or success, he adds. Pocket-lint.com published this on May 31, 2011.

Indeed, according to BitDefender, the latest scam represents just a single instance within numerous schemes for malware distribution that are based on public figure or celebrity lures during recent periods. One such e-mail scam pushing spam messages claimed to display photograph or movie of the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's killing. Still one more current news event that too was used maliciously related to the Barack Obama car incident during his tour to Ireland.

However, to remain protected against the latest as well as most complicated online dangers, the security company suggests that users must load security software including a firewall, a spam filter, and an antivirus program that is always maintained up to date.

Eventually, it's because of the above kinds of malware laced spam runs that there has been a never like before increase in malicious programs across the Internet, states BitDefender.

Related article: E-Crime Reporting Format To Be Launched in July

» SPAMfighter News - 6/9/2011