You have received a new trojan !!!
Tuesday December 23, 2008
It's that time of year when criminals up the ante by sending large numbers of bogus greeting card emails that lead not to good cheer but rather to the installation of backdoors and password stealing trojans. One such email arrives with the subject line: "You have received a new greeting!!!". The body of the email reads:
Hello!
You have recieved a Hallmark E-Card.
To see it, Just click here
Those who fall for the scam and click the link will in fact be downloading a variant of Zapchast, a backdoor with autorun worm capabilities that installs a keylogger and downloads additional malware to infected systems.
If you read your email in plain text only, it will be clear that the email link doesn't lead to Hallmark. Legitimate greeting cards address you by name and include identifying sender information. If the message sounds generic, it's because it's not a special greeting card for you, but rather a mass-spammed email designed to infect anyone who falls for the trick.
Don't be fooled. Think before you click.
I have received several of these Hallmark greetings this season and as they didn’t say who it was from….thank goodness I was smart enough to not click on the link.
I was wondering, which antivirus software do you use, or recommend?
I received one last night that was supposed to have come from a family member. It wasn’t the sort of thing I would expect in that particular account anyway as it was attached to my website. Notice the ‘was’ not ‘is’. I now use an email address for it that I can change easily when too much spam begins to hit it.
Something in the cobwebs of my memory told me that this particular heading had been a virus or something of that ilk in the past, so I binned it.
I hope everybody has a very happy, but most importantly, a very safe Christmas.
Can any antivirus software prevent this threat?