An email appearing to come from Nat West Leicester Business Banking Customer Support with the subject of Online banking application form********* CRM:013545192 ( random numbers) pretending to come from NW – Leicester CRT <[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 content of the email says :

Please find enclosed the requested online application form which

you will need to complete and return to myself via the post.

Kind Regards

Janine Lyles

Relationship Manager’s Assistant

Leicester Business Banking Customer Support

1st Floor

1 Granby Street

Leicester

LE1 6EJ

Tel: 0116 2752435

Fax: 0116 2575469

E Mail: [email protected]

Internal depot code – 075

DATA CLASSIFICATION: unless otherwise stated the information contained within this email is CONFIDENTIAL

Manage your finances anytime, anywhere – download our free Business Banking mobile app

National Westminster Bank Plc, Registered in England No. 486373. Registered Office: 069 Bishopsgate, London EC2M 3UR.

Authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority

This e-mail message is confidential and for use by the addressee only. If the message is received by anyone other than the addressee, please return the message to the sender by replying to it and then delete the message from your computer.

Internet e-mails are not necessarily secure. National Westminster Bank Plc does not accept responsibility for changes made to this message after it was sent. National Westminster Bank Plc may monitor e-mails for business and operational purposes. By replying to this message you give your consent to our monitoring of your email communications with us.

Whilst all reasonable care has been taken to avoid the transmission of viruses, it is the responsibility of the recipient to ensure that the onward transmission, opening or use of this message and any attachments will not adversely affect its systems or data. No responsibility is accepted by National Westminster Bank Plc in this regard and the recipient should carry out such virus and other checks as it considers appropriate.

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.

19 October 2021: Online banking upd appl form.zip: Extracts to: Online banking upd appl form.scr Current Virus total detections:

This is another one of the spoofed icon files that unless you have “show known file extensions enabled“, will look like a proper PDF file instead of the .exe file it really is, so making it much more likely for you to accidentally open it and be infected.

None of the companies that seem to be sending these emails have 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.

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.

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. A lot of 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”, an invoice or receipt from some company for a product or service 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.