The next in the never ending series of malware downloaders is an email with the subject of 45653946 – True Telecom Invoice for August 2017 ( random numbers) pretending to come from [email protected]. This is coming via the Necurs botnet but instead of delivering Locky today, this 2nd malspam run is delivering Globeimposter ransomware
They use email addresses and subjects that will entice a user to read the email and open the attachment.
In the same way that today’s earlier malspam run (https://myonlinesecurity.co.uk/fake-invoice-inv-000379-from-property-lagoon-limited-for-gleneagles-equestrian-centre-delivers-locky-ransomware/) that delivered Locky ransomware, these have a link in the body to download the zip and a zip ( 7z) attachment as well
2017-08-45653946-Bill.7z: 2017-08-41840179-Bill.vbs Current Virus total detections: Payload Security | Another version ( VirusTotal) | (Payload Security ) | downloaded & xor’d binary VirusTotal | Payload Security |
true-telecom.com has not been hacked or had their email or other servers compromised. They are not sending the emails to you. They are just innocent victims in exactly the same way as every recipient of these emails.
I have no idea who Deborah Day is, but assume she is an innocent victim who has had her bill intercepted and used as the template for this malware delivery method
One of the emails looks like:
From: [email protected]
Date: Mon 04/09/2017 14:53
Subject: 45653946 – True Telecom Invoice for August 2017
Attachment: 2017-08-45653946-Bill.7z
Body Content:
Dear Deborah Day
We have attached your latest True Telecom bill for August 2017.
View your bill online
To be able to read your invoice file you will require the Adobe Acrobat PDF viewer. You August already have this installed,
if not please visit the Adobe website and download their free viewer.
Payments made by direct debit will be collected 14 days from the date of the Bill.
If you wish to contact us, please do not hesitate to get in touch with one of our friendly customer services agents.
Telephone: 0800 840 40 60
Fax: 0844 779 2253
Email: [email protected]
Please be advised that this is an unmonitored email address.
With Kind Regards,
The True Telecom Team
www.True-Telecom.com
True Telecom Ltd is registered in England and Wales No. 08225783.
Head Office address: Ground Floor,Lakeview West, Galleon Boulevard, Crossways Business Park, Dartford, Kent, DA2 6QE
This communication together with any attachments transmitted with it (“this E-Mail”) is intended only for the use of the addressee and August contain information which is privileged and confidential. If the reader of this E-Mail is not the intended recipient or the employee or agent responsible for delivering it to the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any use, dissemination, forwarding, printing or copying of this E-Mail is strictly prohibited. Addressees should check this E-mail for viruses.
The Company makes no representations as regards the absence of viruses in this E-Mail. If you have received this E-Mail in error please immediately delete, erase or otherwise destroy this E-Mail and any copies of it. Any opinions expressed in this E-Mail are those of the author and do not necessarily constitute the views of the Company. Nothing in this E-Mail shall bind the Company in any contract or obligation.
The Company only guarantees service in accordance with the service charter. The company accepts no liability for failure of hardware after the termination point. For the purposes of this E-Mail “the Company” is the trading name of True Telecom Ltd. True Telecom Ltd (Registered in England & Wales No. 08225783)
Screenshot:
All the alleged senders, amounts, reference numbers, Bank codes, companies, names of employees, employee positions, email addresses and phone numbers mentioned in the emails are all random. Some of these companies will exist and some won’t. Don’t try to respond by phone or email, all you will do is end up with an innocent person or company who have had their details spoofed and picked at random from a long list that the bad guys have previously found. The bad guys choose companies, Government departments and organisations with subjects that are designed to entice you or alarm you into blindly opening the attachment or clicking the link in the email to see what is happening.
Please read our How to protect yourselves page for simple, sensible advice on how to avoid being infected by this sort of socially engineered malware.
Previous campaigns over the last few weeks have delivered numerous different download sites and malware versions. There are frequently 5 or 6 and even up to 150 download locations on some days, sometimes delivering the exactly same malware from all locations and sometimes slightly different malware versions. Locky does update at frequent intervals during the day, sometimes as quickly as every hour, so you might get a different version of these nasty Ransomware.
This is another one of the files that unless you have “show known file extensions enabled“, can easily be mistaken for a genuine DOC / PDF / JPG or other common file instead of the .EXE / .JS file it really is, so making it much more likely for you to accidentally open it and be infected.
Be very careful with email attachments. All of these emails use Social engineering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(security)) tricks to persuade you to open the attachments that come with the email. Whether it is a message saying “look at this picture of me I took last night” and it appears to come from a friend or is more targeted at somebody who regularly is likely to receive PDF attachments or Word .doc attachments or any other common file that you use every day.
The basic rule is NEVER open any attachment to an email, unless you are expecting it. Now that is very easy to say but quite hard to put into practice, because we all get emails with files attached to them. Our friends and family love to send us pictures of them doing silly things, or even cute pictures of the children or pets.
Never just blindly click on the file in your email program. Always save the file to your downloads folder, so you can check it first. Many malicious files that are attached to emails will have a faked extension. That is the 3 letters at the end of the file name. Unfortunately windows by default hides the file extensions so you need to Set your folder options to “show known file types. Then when you unzip the zip file that is supposed to contain the pictures of “Sally’s dog catching a ball” or a report in word document format that work has supposedly sent you to finish working on at the weekend, or an invoice or order confirmation from some company, you can easily see if it is a picture or document & not a malicious program.
If you see .JS or .EXE or .COM or .PIF or .SCR or .HTA .vbs, .wsf , .jse .jar at the end of the file name DO NOT click on it or try to open it, it will infect you.
While the malicious program is inside the zip file, it cannot harm you or automatically run. When it is just sitting unzipped in your downloads folder it won’t infect you, provided you don’t click it to run it. Just delete the zip and any extracted file and everything will be OK. You can always run a scan with your antivirus to be sure. There are some zip files that can be configured by the bad guys to automatically run the malware file when you double click the zip to extract the file.
If you right click any suspicious zip file received, and select extract here or extract to folder ( after saving the zip to a folder on the computer) that risk is virtually eliminated. Never attempt to open a zip directly from your email, that is a guaranteed way to get infected. The best way is to just delete the unexpected zip and not risk any infection.