Malicious E-mail Scam Pretending to Provide Air Ticket Identified

According to Cyveillance, a security company, one malware-laced spam mail run, spotted over a month back, alluring Internauts for clicking on bogus e-tickets for airplane travel, continues to thrive, published softpedia.com dated October 24, 2014.

A series of details appear on the said spam mail such as the ticket number, departure time and date, seat number and destination of travel related to the airplane ticket, which the e-mail recipient supposedly bought.

The document containing the details seemingly arrives from Delta Airlines through an attachment whose print out the user is supposed to take to avail the ticket.

The researchers from Cyveillance Security Company recognized the malware within the attachment as Trojan Weelsof that is actually a ransomware, which upon infiltration freezes the target desktop, while exhibits a missive demanding ransom for restoring back the computer.

The missive asserts as coming from the officials who've apparently found unlawful matter on the contaminated PC. It then elaborates the way the ransom payment should be made via pre-paid cards, a payment mode that is legally a disqualification. However, the good thing about the malware is that it doesn't have the usual file encoding capability; consequently, no harm is caused to the data that's stored inside the infected computer.

But Weelsof can be removed for which Cyveillance suggests executing an anti-virus scan only from offline during booting of the PC because downloading anti-virus software from the Net won't be possible owing to the locking up of the device.

Interestingly, within an incident about impairing services of users' profile, F-Secure another security company highlighted one instance where a scam electronic mail reaches the about to be victimized user who finds a ticket attached in a file for the identical place he was planning to visit.

In conclusion, it isn't Delta Airlines alone which e-mail scammers have attacked recently. Last year (2013) during the month of October, security researchers identified an e-mail posing as communication from Qantas an airline company of Australia which asserted that the company was looking for employees and so inviting people to apply with their resumes to enable selection of suitable candidates.

» SPAMfighter News - 11/1/2014