Spam Reports

Happy New Year and Dangerous Computer Infections

Another spam gets ready for the Holidays

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

20th of December 2007, 15:31 GMT

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The Christmas tree displayed by the malware

Although we're all expecting to see a rise in the number of web attacks, there are only a few weak spam campaigns currently in progress with low damage potential and pretty easy to detect malicious attachments. Security company F-Secure today found another spam

attack attempting to deploy an executable file, which shows a nice looking Christmas Tree on your desktop. But it actually drops some infections in the background, which are supposed to steal your passwords and send them to the attacker.

The attachment is named happynewyear.exe and is detected by the F-Secure antivirus as Trojan-PSW:W32/Delf.BBE. "Some clown is spamming around an attachment called Happynewyear.exe. When run, this malware drops a nice Christmas tree to your desktop and Systray. The malware itself (detected as Trojan-PSW:W32/Delf.BBE by our antivirus) steals passwords and other assorted information and sends them to [a server]", the F-Secure team wrote in a blog post published today.

We all know that Christmas is the perfect time for launching malicious web attacks, so don't be too amazed in case you see an avalanche of phishing scams, hack attacks, credit card frauds or any other illegal activity. Just remember to keep your antivirus and firewall enabled and updated with the latest virus definitions.

It has already been proved that hackers are willing to do anything it's possible in order to reach their goal, and in case you're so naive to click on an infected URL distributed by email, you're surely their next victim. So, here are some advices: do NOT download malicious attachments included in emails, do NOT open suspect links, do NOT provide your financial information to unknown persons and do NOT buy products that look too good to be true - they are usually only fake items used by the hackers to get your details.

TAGS:

christmas | security | malware | trojan

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