E-Mail With Malicious Attachment Attacks Upcoming Musicians

Security researchers from Webroot state that a particularly dangerous e-mail is circulating online to reach the inboxes of aspiring musicians so that their computers are infected with a malicious program.

States security researcher Andrew Brandt, the e-mail poses as a message from a label "Rock on Records", and says that a record contract is attached inside the message, as per the news published by expert REVIEW on May 4, 2010.

Brandt added that with numerous self promoting musicians utilizing the Internet for campaigning and distributing their work, the e-mail inviting them to a record company for a contract was sufficient for gaining trust of the recipient and eventually for infecting his system.

Actually the contract file attached in the e-mail for the recipient contains a Trojan, which's capable of hijacking his computer. As soon as the user runs the attachment, other malware gets downloaded and executed that compromise his computer. Most commonly, such malware attacks in their worst situation render the infected PC unusable.

Meanwhile, the researchers at Webroot revealed a number of indications that suggests the bogus nature of the e-mail. First, the contract file that uses the spelling "conract" instead of "contract" actually has malware that Webroot has detected as Trojan-Downloader-Tacticlol. Other anti-virus software has detected it differently like Sasfis, Oficla, Losabel or Fregee.

The second indication is that the European format of dating has been used for the file i.e. day.month.year.

Yet another most dangerous indication is that although a Microsoft Word icon marks the Zip file, the suffix used is .doc.exe. This trick is a very old one that online miscreants use to make the false file suffix escape detection.

Moreover, security researchers in their remark about the scam stated that e-mails which contained malicious links and files frequently pretended to provide DHL delivery notices, news stories, etc. But the current malicious e-mail was a new tactic to infect since it was designed to attack aspiring musicians. Consequently, the researchers suggest that computer-users must deploy security software as well as maintain it up-to-date for staying protected.

Related article: E-Crime Reporting Format To Be Launched in July

» SPAMfighter News - 5/14/2010