New Upatre Variant Intercepted in Banking Emails

A new strain of the infamous Upatre downloader are presently being circulated through emails purporting to be from different banking institutions, published softpedia.com on September 30, 2014.

The messages contain a link directing to a notification from a financing enterprise but instead leads to Upatre version employed by cyber crooks in an attempt to channel threats with specific purpose.

The campaign distributes emails containing dissimilar notifications but they all guide to the same attached file posing as payment advice information or a bank account document.

Softpedia.com published news on 30th September, 2014 quoting Conrad Longmore, Security Expert of Dynamoo's Blog, as "there are two such samples out of which one is emulating Lloyds Commercial Bank and the other HSBC Bank in UK."

In both the cases, a link is given to be clicked to download file "document_8641_29092014_pdf.scr," which is an executable that installs Upatre on the system.

VirusTotal analyzed the threats and revealed that the malware variant had low identification among the available AV programs, having being recognized by only one of the available AV solutions. However detection has now increased with 16 out of 55 AV programs classifying the file as tainted.

Security experts claim that unfortunately malware maligned spam campaigns of the above type has caused the surge in malware over the Internet.

To minimse the chances of being victimized by malware campaigns of the above kind, follow the following security steps. Firstly, never open any unexpected emails and always remember that your bank like HSBC and Lloyds Commercial in this case will contact you through emails. Also be careful about unexpected attachments in emails which you are not expecting.

Secondly, it is always advisable to purchase and install antivirus software security as there are many reputed antivirus programs available at the market to purchase. Your Internet provider often will provide a security solution for little or free. It is also advisable to only use one antivirus program, in addition to performance issues, the programs may conflict causing security problems and connection. Please ensure updated security solution because outdated security solution is of no use.

» SPAMfighter News - 10/13/2014