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Zero Day

Ryan Naraine, Emil Protalinski and Dancho Danchev

Spamvertised Easter Greetings lead to malware

By | April 20, 2011, 6:46am PDT

Summary: Security researchers from McAfee are reporting on a currently ongoing event-based social engineering attack, aiming to trick users into clicking on a link found in a malicious email.

Security researchers from McAfee Labs are reporting on a currently ongoing event-based social engineering attack, aiming to trick users into clicking on a link found in a malicious email.

The spamvertised emails come using “Easter Greeting from Alex” subjects, and are using an animated image including a “Download Animated Greeting Here” body. Upon clicking on the link, the user is exposed to a password-stealing malware variant of PWS-ZBot.

With Easter only a few days away, cybercriminals are quickly adapting to the event-based social engineering potential presented by the holiday.

Users are advised to avoid interacting with suspicious links and email attachments found in email messages.

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Dancho Danchev is an independent security consultant and cyber threats analyst, with extensive experience in open source intelligence gathering, malware and cybercrime incident response.

Disclosure

Dancho Danchev

More details on Dancho Danchev's current and past professional affiliations, can be found in his LinkedIn profile.

Biography

Dancho Danchev

Dancho Danchev is an independent security consultant and cyber threats analyst, with extensive experience in open source intelligence gathering, and cybercrime incident response. He's been an active security blogger since 2007, and maintains a popular security blog sharing real-time threats intelligence data with the rest of the community on a daily basis. More details on Dancho Danchev's current and past professional affiliations, can be found in his LinkedIn profile. You can also follow him on Twitter

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RE: Spamvertised Easter Greetings lead to malware
FAULKNE 13th Oct
Good day to confirm this comment I would appreciate T h e b e s t o f Z D N e t d e l i v e r e d your website very nice to everyone Yes, Oracle is the only one with shared-disk architecture, but that is there advantage. It means you can add or remove nodes and the database lives on. In a shared nothing architecture, if you lose a node, you lose the system. I'm sure Oracle appreciates EMC highlighting their advantage.I also desire to signal in your RSS feeds. Thank you as soon as once again and maintain up the great operate Awesome post! Thank you very much || thanks for nice content this is really benefit to me.
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Ah, the double standards...
SonofaSailor 20th Apr 2011
if this were an Apple product, say, the iPhone or iPad...

then, this would simply be a functional advantage of Mobile Me, but since it's Windows it has to be malware.
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apple itunes has a security issue as well so watch it as well. am unsure if its apple/mac itunes though. may be windows, not sure though. though would not mind trying an qpple/mac just ta see what its about. but i love my windows but apple/mac looks cool to.
Fantastic news about the new release.I positively enjoying each little bit of it and I have you b o o k m a r k e d to check out new stuff you weblog post.Im not sure i come to an agreement with you on every level, howevor it absolutely was a good posting, many thanks for taking the time to put up your ideas
Good day to confirm this comment I would appreciate T h e b e s t o f Z D N e t d e l i v e r e d your website very nice to everyone Yes, Oracle is the only one with shared-disk architecture, but that is there advantage. It means you can add or remove nodes and the database lives on. In a shared nothing architecture, if you lose a node, you lose the system. I'm sure Oracle appreciates EMC highlighting their advantage.I also desire to signal in your RSS feeds. Thank you as soon as once again and maintain up the great operate Awesome post! Thank you very much || thanks for nice content this is really benefit to me.

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