MX Lab Detects Spam Mail Supposedly Issuing Carrefour E-Card

According to researchers at MX Lab the e-mail security company situated in Belgium, one fresh spam campaign is doing the rounds as it delivers bogus e-mails promising e-cards that Carrefour the hypermarket chain in France was providing.

Says MX Lab, displaying the subject line, "You've received A Carrefour Bank E-Card!" the spam message spoofs the sender's address as though it originated from E-Cards@bank.com, while carrying the Hallmark label, a popular e-card quality control guarantor.

Moreover, addressing recipients of the unsolicited e-mail, the spam message tells them that they've just got one Carrefour E-Card, which they can view by following a given web-link. Thereafter, it states that the recipient is invited to send one such e-card to his friend and make him happy for the day. Finally, the e-mail signs off from friends at Carrefour.

Now, users who follow the web-link, land up on a site, which hosts a file named Carrefour.exe that according to Virus Total is an incarnation of Sality the infamous PC-worm. Importantly, Sality represents a group or collection of worms that infect computer files and it proliferates by contaminating .scr and .exe files, remark security researchers.

Meanwhile, aside the link there isn't any malevolent attachment.

Furthermore according to the researchers at MX Lab, currently, the web-link embedded on the spam mail is non-operational since they encountered a web-page indicating a failed operation of Safari to open the same any further as the server hosting the page wasn't responding.

Highlight MX Lab researchers that despite the probability of the ongoing campaign's set up being shoddy, users are urged to delete any e-mail of the said kind from their inboxes. For, anytime it can happen that the sender alters the scam, serving the malevolent payload in some other form.

Conclusively, to lessen destruction emanating from the above kind of malevolent spam, specialists recommend end-users that they mustn't view electronic mails, which originate from unexpected/unreliable sources like Carrefour within the above mentioned instance from where the e-mails are most unexpected. Further, users are urged for deploying security software as also regularly maintaining it up-to-date so their systems will remain protected, the specialists add.

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» SPAMfighter News - 7/23/2011