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Malware Laced E-mails Featuring Offers/Ads Increasing, Finds Kaspersky

Kaspersky Lab the security company has just released a study paper that highlights how malicious software is increasing through phony notifications and ads in e-mail.

Precisely, according to the report, cyber-criminals are chiefly distributing malware-laced spam mails that are crafted to inform about offers for coupons, and these are on the rise.

Earlier, Kaspersky observed within its spring study paper too that the said coupon spam was prevalent then also. But currently, rather than add viruses in file attachments to the said spam mails, cyber-criminals are embedding malevolent web-links. Advertisements resembling Groupon appear as the greatest trend in the spam, according to the security company.

The latest report additionally states that Kaspersky Lab's researchers anticipated the phony e-mail spam as Internauts highly prefer coupons while reposing faith in such forms of service. As a result, dispatching an e-mail that looks like some coupon service most perfectly camouflages malware for e-mail recipients.

The month was July 2012. Kaspersky Lab first spotted the spam mails. At that time, the information in the e-mail disguised to be from one prominent coupon service that carried out a fresh promotion while contained a zipped archive labeled Giftcoupon.exe. The particular executable file was malicious as it carried Trojan.Win32.Yakes.aigd. However, the web-links inside those malicious e-mails linked up with the Groupon Internet site that was real without any malicious string attached. Quite naturally, this worked out nicely deceptive for the spammers in acquiring Internauts' trust.

But the situation completely changed by the time it was September 2012. The security company observed that the spam mails then, supposedly dispatched from Groupon, were without any attachment, nonetheless, every web-link inside the messages diverted the recipients onto some entity that had exploits.

Hence for precaution - coupon services don't ever send attachments through electronic mails so one requires re-checking the e-mail got, whether it's really from any genuine source. The person needs to verify the authenticity of the message by substantiating whether the sender's id exists legitimately. Further, he should use the mouse to preview the web-addresses related to the embedded web-links and find out if the URLs are authentic.

Related article: Malware has lesser proximity to your inbox now!

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