An email with the subject of INT242343 Unpaid Invoice – Your Services May Be Suspended pretending to come from payments <[email protected]> with a zip attachment is another one from the current bot runs which try to download various Trojans and password stealers especially banking credential stealers, which may include cridex, dridex, dyreza and various Zbots, cryptolocker, ransomware and loads of other malware on your computer. 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.

The email looks like:

From: payments <[email protected]>

Date: Thu 11/02/2021 08:38

Subject: INT242343 Unpaid Invoice – Your Services May Be Suspended

Attachment: OutstandingStatement201602111650.js

Body Content:

PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS A NO REPLY EMAIL ACCOUNT

Dear Customer Please find attached to this email your statement You can view the invoices listed on our e-billing site at www.netbills.co.uk If you have any queries regarding use of the e-billing site or this statement please call us on 08444 12 7777.

Accounts Department Wavenet Group Incorporating – Titan Technology, Centralcom and S1 Network Services Tel 08444127777

This email and its attachments may be confidential and are intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed and should be considered private and protected by law. Any views or opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Wavenet Ltd or its subsidiaries. Wavenet Ltd Registered in England No 3919664. Registered address: Friars Gate 2, 1011 Stratford Road, Shirley, Solihull, West Midlands, B90 4BN. If you are not the intended recipient of this email and its attachments, you must take no action based upon them, nor must you copy or show them to anyone. Please contact the sender if you believe you have received this email in error. Wavenet Ltd reserves the right to monitor email communications through its networks.

This email and its attachments may be confidential and are intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed and should be considered private and protected by law. Any views or opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Wavenet Ltd or its subsidiaries. If you are not the intended recipient of this email and its attachments, you must take no action based upon them, nor must you copy or show them to anyone. Please contact the sender if you believe you have received this email in error. Wavenet Ltd reserves the right to monitor email communications through its networks

Screenshot: NONE

These malicious attachments normally 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, companies, names of employees and phone numbers mentioned in the emails are all innocent and are just picked at 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.

You can now send any suspicious files for examination by the antivirus companies via our submission system

11 February 2021:OutstandingStatement201602111650.js Current Virus total detections: MALWR shows a download of Dridex banking malware from http://aforbescompany.com/09u8h76f/65fg67n which once again is a text file that the javascript saves to & renames to %Temp%\sREKjVas.scr or another random named file ( VirusTotal)

Other download locations so far discovered include: http://gp-training.net/09u8h76f/65fg67n

Outlook and most other email clients should block the download of .JS files in an email and make it difficult for you to actually get them. This should help to protect a large number of user.

This is another one of the spoofed icon files that unless you have “show known file extensions enabled“, will look like a DOC 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 (http://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. Most ( if not all) 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, you can easily see if it is a picture or document & not a malicious program. If you see .EXE or .COM or .PIF or .SCR 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.