Merry Christmas everybody. I was quite surprised to receive this email pretending to come from UPS.com saying “Your UPS Invoice Is Ready” on Christmas Eve, especially as it is a Sunday. These generally are sent to businesses on a working day to get the most benefit. I suppose they could be sending them out today knowing that almost all business in English speaking countries worldwide are closed until Wednesday, so when workers return, they might be less careful and consequently open and run the attachment without thinking. It contains a java adwind or Java JRAT attachment. Many Antiviruses on Virus Total detect these heuristically.
This is a very well crafted email and malware campaign and will fool a lot of recipients, if it gets past their email filters. Especially if windows is using the default setting to Hide known file types. All the links in the email do go to the genuine UPS website.
UPS.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.
This particular Java Adwind / JRAT version is one of the most aggressive that I have seen in a long time. As you can see from the online sandbox reports, it tries to stop many security programs, network monitoring tools and several windows services including taskmanager. It does this in 2 ways. Firstly using taskkill to stop the running process, then adding an Image File Execution Options / debugger to stop the programs running at all. It also uses Regedit to change several of the default registry settings to lower the security settings of windows and allow high risk files to be downloaded, saved and run without warnings.
You can now submit suspicious sites, emails and files via our Submissions system
Make Note: Java Adwind / Java Jacksbot are both very dangerous remote access backdoor Trojans, that have cross OS capabilities and can potentially run and infect any computer or operating system including windows, Apple Mac, Android and Linux. It however can only be active or infect you if you have Sun / Oracle Java installed. Along with most security professionals, I strongly urge you to uninstall java and not use it, unless you have a pressing need for it. The majority of domestic ( home ) users and small businesses have no need for Java on their computers. This Article from a couple of years ago explains why you should remove it. If you cannot remove it then it must be kept up to date and be extremely careful with what you download or open.
They use email addresses and subjects that will entice a user to read the email and open the attachment. A very high proportion are being targeted at small and medium size businesses, with the hope of getting a better response than they do from consumers.
Remember many email clients, especially on a mobile phone or tablet, only show the Name in the From: and not the bit in <domain.com >. That is why these scams and phishes work so well.
None of the companies mentioned in the body of the email 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.
INVOICE.zip extracts to INVOICEE.jar (533kb) Current Virus total detections | Hybrid Analysis | Anyrun Beta |
The email looks like:
From: UPS <[email protected]>
Date: Sun 24/12/2021 03:56
Subject: Your UPS Invoice Is Ready
Attachment: INVOICE.zip
Body Content:
Hi [email protected]
Your new invoice is now available. Please view the attach document to view and pay your invoice.
Thank you for your business.
For additional support, please view the UPS Billing Center User Guide.
________________________________________
© 2017 United Parcel Service of America, Inc. UPS, the UPS brandmark, and the color brown are trademarks of United Parcel Service of America, Inc. All rights reserved.
For more information on UPS’s privacy practices, refer to the UPS Privacy Policy.
Please do not reply directly to this e-mail. UPS will not receive any reply message.
For questions or comments, visit Contact UPS.
This communication contains proprietary information and may be confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, the reading, copying, disclosure or other use of the contents of this e-mail is strictly prohibited and you are instructed to please delete this e-mail immediately. Privacy Policy
Contact UPS
Email Headers:
| IP | Hostname | City | Region | Country | Organisation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 107.178.104.102 | we.love.servers.at.ioflood.com | Phoenix | Arizona | US | AS53755 Input Output Flood LLC |
Received: from [107.178.104.102] (port=50409 helo=ups.com)
by knight.knighthosting.co.uk with esmtp (Exim 4.89_1)
(envelope-from <[email protected]>)
id 1eSxOq-00059E-5l
for [email protected]; Sun, 24 Dec 2017 03:56:33 +0000
From: UPS <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Your UPS Invoice Is Ready
Date: 23 Dec 2017 19:56:21 -0800
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary=”—-=_NextPart_000_0012_03BBC140.3FAD3506″
These malicious attachments have a password stealing component, with the aim of stealing your bank, PayPal or other financial details along with your email or FTP ( web space) log in credentials. Many of them are also designed to specifically steal your Facebook and other social network log in details.
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.
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 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 .JAR or .EXE or .COM or .PIF or .SCR or .HTA 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.