Monday 13 August 2007

Public Service Announcment

I seem to be getting inundated with suspect e-mail attachments from companies like egreetings.com, FreeWebCards.com, MyPostcards.com etc.
My AV quarantines them as "potentially unwanted message body detected" so they aren't doing any damage (as far as I know), but are getting annoying.Most of the headers are "you've received a greeting card from a (school mate, friend, relative etc)"
It turns out it the latest scam to get you to visit a site which will download spyware/malaware onto your PC.
I've had about 30 of these in the last few weeks, so I thought I was being targeted but after some checking it appears over 40 million of these e-mails are currently being sent every day!!

Official Report
"Internet spammers launched a widespread attack on e-mail inboxes this month. But instead of trying to lure users into opening a corrupted attachment, they're concealing a computer virus in a link to an online greeting card."

Explanation from an IT friend
"Those e-mails are all "drive-by" Trojan attempts - send the mail address a URI and see if the owner will visit it. If you visit the URI, you download and run a Trojan that adds your PC to the vast network of "zombies" through which the original e-mail was sent."

So obviously I recommend deleting any suspect greeting cards you receive,
or better still be paranoid like me and delete anything with an attachment :)

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