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Spam Emails with Malware Target French Users - Trend Micro

Researchers of security firm Trend Micro are warning about a clever and very well executed campaign of email spam which has been targeting French users to infect their machines with banking malware, backdoor malware and ransomware.

The spammers attack corporate and home users with emails impersonating the French Ministry of Justice.

The subject line of the email gets changed but the text remains the same and it says (in French) that a court has decided to seize the property of the recipient.

The recipients are asked to download and open the attached word file containing a copy of the judgement. The document once downloaded opens a picture from the file hosting website savepic.su: a replica of a hard-copy letter sent to individuals by the Ministry of Justice stating their inability to help with cases which are already in courts.

The researchers observed that this letter might have been accessed from a hijacked system or inbox of email or by an associate functioning on behalf of the crooks and added that there is no mistake in the text of the email.

This is very unusual because spammed messages mostly have errors (whatever language they employ). It proves that someone who is an expert in French language is accountable for writing the text in the spammed emails. Combining with the genuine decoy image, it becomes easy to observe how a French Internaut would not immediately realize that he had been victimized by spam.

We guess that the pictures were downloaded and seen over 1,700 times for two days during the middle of March.

We also found other campaigns containing spam using the same malware families for their droppers and payloads. Other countries like Italy are also being targeted now. Blog.trendmicro.com published news on 30th March, 2015 quoting Cedric Pernet, Threat Researcher with Trend Micro , and Dark Luo/Kenney Lu , Threat Analysts with Trend Micro, as saying: "For example, we have seen a sample of email with a document attached with it namely documente copy.doc."

Unfortunately, these attacks are still happening and Trend Micro feels that it will continue and victimize more users.

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