Spammers Disseminate Free Pizza Voucher E-mails for Filling up Asprox Botnet

According to Cloudmark the security company, cyber-criminals are distributing spam mails, offering coupons to buy pizza for free, while trying to infect more PCs to be added to the notorious botnet Asprox, also called Kuluz.

People may assume that no one would believe free coupons for pizza were available, yet the current scam appears so real that it could dupe even those users who're more suspicious.

It seems Pizza Hut, the restaurant is observing 55 years of existence, so it's promoting itself by offering free coupons for its pizzas. However, Cloudmark noticed that it was 1956 when the restaurant came into existence so the present year should have been its 58th anniversary, something which the scam victims didn't know or weren't verifying.

It is really a clue to show the fraudulent nature of the e-mail, as all its remaining parts maintain the deceit; the message yet claims November 5, 2014 as the deadline to cash in the coupon.

Elaborating on this latest scam, Research Analyst Andrew Conway with Cloudmark states that clicking the web-link in the message doesn't provide any free pizza coupon rather it delivers one zipped file having an executable for Windows PC that subsequently pulls the victim's computer into the malevolent Asprox botnet. Asprox botnet dates back to 2008 and since then it has been growing suddenly at times while reducing in size at other, possibly for avoiding security community's efforts of countermeasure, Conway contends. Blog.cloudmark.com published this dated October 29, 2014.

As for Cloudmark, the company blogs that the current assault seems more convincing compared to the usual invoice else parcel delivery spam that too disseminate malware.

Crux of the issue: e-mail recipients mustn't follow any web-link inside uninvited e-mails, particularly when they are already inside the junk folder. Although pizzas for free may appear far greatly convincing vis-à-vis Nigerian gold, despite so they're both dangerous frauds. Anybody still feeling tempted towards opening the web-link for free pizza should first brush the PC-mouse on the link to ensure the URL leads onto http://pizzahut.com/ rather than onto http://pizzahut.cn where .cn is certain randomly hijacked domain, advises Conway.

» SPAMfighter News - 11/8/2014