PCs poisoned by 'Google Pharmacy' scam

The phishing e-mail, which contains a realistic Google logo but with the two "o"s replaced with blue Viagra pills, was spotted by Internet security firm Surf Control's threat centre Thursday afternoon.

According to Ursula Radford, APAC marketing director at Surfcontrol, if a user clicks on the link contained in the e-mail, they are sent to a Web site that drops two relatively harmless Trojan horse programs on their PC. However, although the programs do not do much on their own, when combined they could be lethal.

What does the e-mail look like?

The first Trojan slightly changes the PC's security while the second Trojan hijacks the browser and redirects the user to another Web site. When the user reaches the second Web site, the hole created by the first Trojan is exploited by a virus and the user's PC is infected.

"That is a technique the [malware writers] are using. If the first Trojan is full of malicious code then it gets shut down straight away. Instead, it redirects you to another site and that is where the viruses are," Radford told ZDNet Australia in a telephone interview.

This attack comes a week after Google's arch rival Microsoft was used in a phishing scam that attempted to fool users into installing a fake patch for Windows.