DHL Again Abused in Spam Campaign

Security researchers at security firm Avira detected a DHL spam campaign in the first week of May 2010.

The e-mail says that the recipient has to open the "invoice" attached with the mail so as to obtain the package from DHL office.

It is noteworthy that such kinds of spam messages are very commonly seen, and with more or less same appearance, despite the regularly changing style adopted by spammers, said Avira security experts. They also said that these fake e-mails are distributed in huge numbers so as to trick large number of people and infecting their PCs with malware.

In this malicious campaign, there is a ZIP archive attached to the e-mail. This attachment contains a variant of Ofida family of Trojans. Once executed, the Trojan will download other malware along with installing a rogue anti-virus application. The anti-virus stops new programs from getting executed and shows a message box informing user that there has been some infection in the software. Besides this, a bogus scanner screen exhibits a fake set of malware on user's PC.

The user is urged to purchase the complete version of the rogue anti-virus software so as to get rid of all the infections allegedly affecting his computer system. The user is asked to make a payment of US$ 50 to get the malware disabled, which might not function properly as further malware was downloaded on the system. So, Avira warns users in its blog post to avoid paying for such fake anti-virus software (or scareware), as per the news published in the first week of May 2010 by techblog.avira.com.

Security experts, as usual, advised users to follows some simple but necessary security tips to avoid such dubious e-mails as they may infect their systems with malware. Firstly, such spam e-mails should not be opened and should be deleted unread. Secondly, it is advisable to have a primary e-mail address (for the acquaintances) and a secondary address (for the rest of the purposes like business). Lastly, it is equally important to have good quality Internet security software in place.

Related article: Dell Cautions About Malware Infecting Its Motherboards

» SPAMfighter News - 5/26/2010