Crooks are pretty bold these days.
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Fake White House Christmas card hid malware
Summary
An email that appeared to be a holiday greeting from the White House instead hid malware that stole data
Topics
An email sent to an unknown number of government employees and contractors two days before Christmas appeared to be a holiday greeting from the White House but instead hid malware that stole data.
The innocent-looking holiday e-greeting prompted recipients to click to view the card, but when the file was opened, malware known as "Zeus" was downloaded to the computer, according to reports. Zeus is known as a banking Trojan horse designed to steal passwords and online credentials, mostly for financial fraud.
In this attack, PDFs, as well as Microsoft Word and Excel documents, were stolen and surreptitiously uploaded to a server in Belarus, according to the Krebs on Security blog, which reported the attack earlier this week.
For more on this story, read Malware in fake White House e-card steals data on CNET News.
Just In
Is this something that exploited the fact that Windows hides extensions by default? Did it use some vulnerability in Java or Flash or in a common file format like PDFs? It would be nice to know exactly where the security broke down.
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