Spammers’ Gimmick Office Printers

According to a research report revelation by Symantac, hackers have devised yet another technique of gimmicking with innocent people. This time, malicious mails seem legitimately coming from office printers and are attached to entice people into opening them.

According to Paul Wood, Senior Intelligence Analyst for Symantec.cloud, a web-based security and e-mail branch, this type of attack can be claimed to be the beginning of another new malware campaign since the use of scanners and printers is the first of its kind. Wood further added that perhaps by using printers and scanners, cyber crooks wanted to create a sense of security among the people, as reported in the news published in COMPUTERWORLD on September 27, 2011.

However, the e-mails invariably constitutes some kind of a Trojan downloader that can be employed towards downloading malware or even take down confidential documents from the computer.

A collection of similar examples of such malevolent e-mails are published by Symantec in its recent release of Intelligence Report. The first impression of the e-mails looks quite convincing with a forwarded message in the subject line "Scan from a HP Officejet." The e-mail informs the recipient that the attached document was scanned and sent by using a Hewlett-Packard HP Officejet 05701J and sent by Morton.

The e-mails contain a zipped file, which when opened automatically leaves a Trojan virus ready to steal documents and other personal information from the computer of a victim.

Even though Windows are enabled to open a zipped file there are circumstances when the
scammers try to befool recipients with a vague zip file and for those who employ a third-party tool to unzip the content. However, the archiving tools appear to show varied mail attachments. Some of them contain a doc file while the others contain a jpg file. The hackers however manipulate file names that make it less suspicious, as reported in news published in the PCWorld on September 27, 2011.

Albeit, Woods while continuing with his apprehension about the spammed e-mail signified that sender's name can be easily spoofed in e-mail to make it appear to be coming from a legitimate recipient. Even some of the messages at first glance appear to be sent from a company, which makes it more likely that the recipient would definitely open the mail attachment.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 10/6/2011