Bogus E-mails Regarding QuickBooks Invoice Getting Spammed, Cautions Security Expert

Dynamoo Blog's Conrad Longmore as Security Blogger is cautioning Internauts of fake QuickBooks invoices that cyber-criminals are distributing through e-mail as they carry malicious software, published softpedia.com dated September 13, 2013.

It maybe noted that QuickBooks, software for purposes of accounting, is an Intuit product that the company has developed and promotes commercially.

The bogus electronic mails seem as "QuickBooks Invoice" generated messages having the subject line "Important - Payment Overdue."

They tell recipients that their past months' invoices are attached. Accordingly, they require depositing the payment that should not exceed the date 09/16/2013. The payment should be as per the agreement on 'Payment Terms.' Subsequently, the e-mails express gratitude for doing deals with QuickBooks and sign off from someone named Quentin Sprague.

But there's an executable inside the attachment that's labeled as Invoice_20130912.zip. This executable conceals one fresh ZeuS variant, the Trojan which's created for filching confidential credentials from contaminated PCs.

As soon as it contaminates any computer, the ZeuS connects to an URL supported via certain compromised server. Recently, within one United States Postal Service (USPS) bulk e-mail scam, this very server was utilized, says Longmore.

Perpetrators of the new fake e-mail campaign hope that receivers of the messages, out of panic after finding the huge overdue payment on their name, will open the attachment devoid of second thoughts.

Unfortunately, it's because of the above kinds of malware laced mass electronic mail campaigns which have resulted in an increase in malicious software, online, remarks Longmore. As a backing to his remark, latest spam statistics from Kaspersky published, during July 2013, shows that spam mails were behind 71.2% of the entire e-mail, with harmful attachments in 2.2% mass messages.

Finally, Intuit's name in spam campaigns appeared earlier too when, during July 2012, fake electronic mails captioned "Payroll processing" supposedly from Intuit asserted about a huge sum of money withdrawal soon to get done out of bank A/C of the recipient was for meeting employee paychecks. For downloading the payroll particulars, recipients were solicited for following a given web-link, which if they did, a website opened, which served an info-stealing malware.

» SPAMfighter News - 9/23/2013