My Photos is another one from the current zbot runs which try to drop cryptolocker, ransomware and loads of other malware on your computer. They are using 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.

Almost all of these have a password stealing component, with the aim of stealing 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.

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.

Very simple email with content just saying Please find attached photos of my birthday party.

This one is particularly nasty and dangerous because it doesn’t give any outward signs of infection. It downloads an auto-configure script from which then attempts to send all traffic through a proxy server which then filters out UK banking traffic to another proxy where they can steal all your banking log on and account information. Each UK bank is sent to a different proxy where the sites are set up to intercept traffic to the genuine UK bank site.

That way, you think that you are on the genuine UK bank site and you actually are, but the proxy between you and the bank can read everything you type or do on the bank site. You have absolutely no idea that this is happening & you still get a padlock in the address bar to say that you are on a safe site

23 August 2014: My Photos.zip ( 8kb): Extracts to My Photos.exe Current Virus total detections: 10/50

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.

Be very careful when unzipping them and make sure you have “show known file extensions enabled“, And then look carefully at the unzipped file. If it says .EXE then it is a problem and should not be run or opened.