State officials seem to conduct a lot of their business lately via email

Sep 15, 2011 12:00 GMT  ·  By

It would seem that the New York State Police is sending traffic tickets to those who were caught speeding via email. If you open the attachment, you might not have to pay the ticket, but you'll sure have to thoroughly disinfect your computer.

According to a printscreen of the email provided by Bkis Blog, the “Uniform Traffic Ticket” comes from the address [email protected], which you can realize it would probably fool a lot of people.

Apparently, the message comes from the Department of Motor Vehicles and it informs the unsuspecting victim that he was caught speeding in New York city at a certain time and he is charged of committing the violation “speed over 55 zone.”

The receiver is requested to print out the attached ticket and send it out to the town court of Chatam at a provided PO BOX.

Attached to the email is an archive that contains what seems to be a .pfd file. This file is actually a Trojan which connects to a number of addresses and downloads a few other malicious elements.

The Trojan was identified as being W32.FakeHddRepair.Trojan which constantly displays hardware error messages.

Later it turns out to be a piece of scareware that starts a fake hardware scanner which informs the user of hard drive errors and in order to resolve these issues, the application needs to be activated. Of course that the activation comes at a price that the victim has to pay if he wants to get rid of all the pesky alerts.

An up-to-date anti-virus solution should be enough to prevent the virus from acting up, but of course, if you don't want to get infected in the first place, you should control your curiosity in these situations. As mentioned many times before, state officials will never send important things over email and banks will never ask for credit card information.