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New Malicious Scam Fooled Skype Users

Many Skype subscribers are becoming victim by new Internet scam targeting them with malware-ridden web links, as per the security experts of security firm Kaspersky Labs.

Dmitry Bestuzhev, expert of Kaspersky Lab, claimed after finding the scam, that the scam has already fooled thousands of people through socially engineered, bogus instant messages, according to a statement printed by v3.co.uk on April 4, 2013.

Elaborating about the scam, he said: "the infection vector is via social engineering abusing infected Skype by transferring huge number of messages to the contacts such as: 'I don't think I will ever sleep again after observing this photo' or 'tell me what you think of this picture I edited'," according to the news published by securelist.com on April 4, 2013.

"Goo.gl short URL service displays that at present there are more than 170k clicks on the malicious URL and merely 1 hour ago there were nearly 160k clicks. It shows that the campaign is quite famous and active with almost 10k click per hour or 2.7k clicks per second", he says further.

The malware used in the scam reportedly enslaves users' machine to the criminal's botnet and is designed to mine Bitcoins.

Kaspersky said that the malware is specifically hazardous as it can increase using infected USB sticks. malware uses IRC protocol to communicate with the C&C (command & control) as a part of the botnet once it's compromised.

Bestuzhev said, that maximum number of victims who are impacted by this attack, came from Ukraine and Russia. The other most obvious infected countries are: Bulgaria, Italy, China, and Taiwan, he adds further.

Till now, the detection rate of the malware is very low as it can be found by only 12 of 46 AV solutions present on VirusTotal.

This is the second attack found targeting Skype users in first week of April 2013. Before this attack, Webroot, security firm, reported uncovering a cyber black market selling Twitter and Skype users account details.

So, to prevent themselves from these kinds of cyber crooks attacks, users are suggested to update their system regularly with the most up-to-date anti-virus solutions.

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