ecard.exe - a new breed of spam...
You will not have failed to notice that since the end of June our inboxes have been in inundated with emails claiming "You've received a greeting card from a Colleague!" or "You've received an ecard from a Class mate!". You may already be aware that these emails are spam (you are probably getting 2 or three a day after all!) but what you may not know is that these seemingly harmless emails - after all they contain no dodgy attachments - are in fact a means to infect your machine with a malicious Trojan... and all from one "click" of your mouse.
The reason these emails are so dangerous is because the link to the "ecard" contained within, whisks any unsuspecting click-happy surfer to the website claiming to be holding a card from your friend/colleague/personal trainer/dog walker... and this webpage contains a snippet of javascript that tries to exploit a security vulnerability in your browser to gain control of your machine and infect it with Malware...The subtle difference with this spam strategy and others like it is the way in which it uses subtle social engineering to get a result for the spammers. There are many instants on the web of people who upon celebrating their birthday have inadvertantly clicked a link in one of these emails and infected their machines, thinking the email was genuine.
1. Never click links in emails unless they are from a trusted source. Even if it is your birthday, or you really think you've won the South African Lottery...
2. STOP using Internet Explorer and get Firefox
3. Get a Mac...
posted by Archetype @ Tuesday, July 31, 2007
2 Comments:
Your last phrase "Get a Mac..."
Ia a Mac raelly immune from these sorts of malware (malware being an overarching term for worms and viruses and trojans and spyware and and and.."
My mayes mac still gets these annoying emails telling him about a greeting from "neighbour" or "Mate"etc
How can we stop the email in the first place
So, 2 questions
1 Are Macs immune
2 How to stop the spurious email
1. Yes Macs are immune to the effects of this type of malware, as they are designed to run on and exploit security holes in Windows based PCs. That's not to say that Macs will always be immune or un-targeted, but the financial benefits of targeting a platform with such a small market share are non-existent: Lets not forget that these viral and malware "designers" are in this for profit.
If your friend was to click on the link in the email nothing would happen.
2. To stop this type of email invading your inbox takes a good spam filter which your ISP should have as standard. Give it a few months and you won't be receiving these emails at all as the software manufacturers incorporate the tell tales signs of this spam campaign into their filters.
In the meantime don't click the links!
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