Name of Chinese Manufacturer of Ceramic Products Exploited in Malware Spam Campaign

Security researchers of security firm MX Lab warned that 'Guangzhou Jintao Ceramic Co. Ltd.', a Chinese producer of ceramic products name, is presently being exploited in a malware laced spam email campaign.

Experts of MX Lab have spotted emails entitled "Purchase Order" which assert to come from someone named 'Jane Wang'.

The emails tell the recipient to authenticate the payment slip that was prepared to the account printed on the invoice amounting to $30,000 for 30%."

The fake emails seem to arrive from 'Guangzhou Jintao Ceramic' but actually they have no connection with the company. In fact, they contain a link pointing to a tainted file hosted on a hijacked website and this malicious file gets downloaded once the link is clicked. The malware, a variation of Zeus which is the notorious computer Trojan designed to embezzle banking information.

The company highlights that the 'Zeus Trojan' is undoubtedly one of the most treacherous banking Trojan which was first detected in July, 2007 and since then the malware has shown no signs of dying down. Kaspersky Lab highlights that in 2012 it had identified in excess of 3.5 million attempted Zeus attacks on 896,000 machines in different countries.

MX Lab adds that at the time of writing, only 16 out of 49 AV (anti-virus) engines detected the Trojan.

Disturbingly, it is due to malware-laced spam email campaigns of the afore-discussed types that have resulted in the surge of malware over the Internet, Security experts comment at the security firm comment. Their comment is supported by data released by Kaspersky in their just released 'Spam in August 2013' Report, according to which malicious attachments were detected in 5.6% of emails in August 2013 which is an increase of 3.4 percentage points in comparison to July 2013.

Hence, if you receive such emails, simply ignore them.

The security experts warn that opening the link on a corporation computer may have devastating impact because the malware may allow cyber crooks to gain entrée to business bank accounts.

The security firm recommends scanning your system with a good quality anti-virus solution in such a scenario.

» SPAMfighter News - 10/1/2013