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E-mail Spammers Exploiting Online Bankers’ ‘Financial Fear’

According to researchers from Sophos, cyber-criminals in a new e-mail scam are exploiting consumers' 'financial fear' as they bank online.

The unsolicited electronic mails, which display a date-of-payment and a ten-digit consumer code, address recipients as "Dear Customer" and use the headers "Credit Card overdue," "Payment by credit card overdue" or "Your financial debt overdue."

Moreover, they tell recipients that their credit cards have expired since 1-week and that the details are given in an attachment. Asking recipients to read it carefully, the e-mails explain that once users clear their debt over a two-day time-frame, they won't be charged anything additional. But if the time-frame exceeds 2-days then they'll be charged a late fee of $25.

The e-mails try to sound real, so they request recipients to leave them unanswered explaining they're auto-generated online notifications, observe the researchers.

But incase users get duped and they view the attachment then they're most likely to download one malevolent Trojan -Troj/Invo-Zip, which can allow remote-attackers to gain admission into victims' PCs.

Commenting on this, Senior Technology Consultant Graham Cluley at Sophos stated that no matter if the attacks tried to convince users that they were close to watching one lust-filled video, were declared winners of two airline tickets, alternatively were discoverers of a firm, which had been charging on their payment cards, they were all designed with the same intention i.e. to fool them into executing a highly-perilous program on their PCs. Nakedsecurity.sophos.com published this on July 26, 2011.

And because the above kinds of e-mail campaigns are so malicious, Sophos suggests users that incase such e-mails reach them they mustn't take down any attachment. Moreover, incase they're worried regarding their account for Internet-banking then they should straight away contact their financial institution.

Eventually, according to Sophos, it's because of the aforementioned kinds of malware assaults that have resulted in malicious programs to rise rapidly online. Their contention received the support of Symantec's security report for June 2011 that states that the worldwide rate of virus-laced e-mails to total e-mail accounted for 1 in 280.9 messages during July 2011 representing a 0.01% rise since June 2011.

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

» SPAMfighter News - 8/6/2011

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