Spam Scheme Masquerading as Booking.com Appears Afresh - Sophos

Security researchers from Sophos the security company warn that one widely spreading spam mail scam, which poses as communication from Booking.com, a well known hotel booking site, via its customer care, has been recently detected.

Though it's true that Booking.com is extremely favorable to people looking for temporary stay somewhere yet even if anyone isn't thinking about a trip, he may well become susceptible to framing unsafe decisions in case he gets any of the spam mails. An unsafe decision that may result in his PC getting compromised followed with his private data getting captured, notes Sophos.

The e-mails that display a caption "Booking Confirmation [random number]," however, don't have a message body, but there's one file attachment named Booking_BEDDING-INCLUSIONS.zip, says Sophos.

But, like the security company outlines, it will be a huge error to open this attachment.

The zipped folder has one file known as Booking_BEDDING-INCLUSIONS.pdf.exe that apparently looks like an innocuous Portable Document Format (PDF) file, yet actually there's one highly destructive malware concealed inside it detected as Mal/BredoZp-B.

Worryingly, the stated Mal/BredoZp-B Trojan is capable of carrying out file system modifications, registry value alterations, memory changes as well as registry key alterations. Its infection leads to severe damage for any operating system along with data files stored on the PC, warns Sophos.

Disturbingly, scams similar as above definitely aren't unknown, with Internauts possibly wary about the way such ruses work. Yet, it is lucid that the mentioned spam outbreaks continue to be significantly successful for, hadn't that been the case, online crooks would not have cared to launch them any further, the researchers remark.

Meanwhile, for remaining safe from the still going malevolent spam scheme, specialists intensely recommend that end-users mustn't open attachments within uninvited dubious appearing e-mails. Moreover, they should remember that no genuine organization will ever dispatch the said kind of notifications.

Eventually, cyber-criminals targeted Booking.com once previously too during the recent period. For, MX Lab, during August 2012, spotted one Trojan BDS/Andromeda.EB.6 that was delivered through scam e-mails supposedly from the same site about certain hotel reservation and with a caption named "Hotel Reservation [3709602]".

Related article: Spam Scam Bags a Scottish Connection

» SPAMfighter News - 10/18/2012