Fake Bankwest – You Have A New EStatement Mass Malspam Delivers Trickbot Banking Trojan
The next in the never ending series of Trickbot banking Trojan downloaders is an email with the subject of Bankwest – You have a new eStatement pretending to come from Bankwest <[email protected]>
They use email addresses and subjects that will entice a user to read the email and open the attachment.
Bankwest 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.
There are links in the email bodies to numerous compromised sites. All the links are in the format of < compromised site>/statement.html. The first one I checked was http://comtechadsl.com/statement.html which redirects via an iframe to http://wittinhohemmo.net/statement.php which downloads a randomly numbered eStatement .js file which in turn downloads the Trickbot Banking Trojan.
The copy I have quickly examined ended up trying to download from 2 Locations http://monstermx.com/wetjmkr.exe which gave the Trickbot version. And http://guadaloffice.es/uxwomay.exe which gives me a “High Security Alert Warning” from the Antivirus/ network protection system on the server. It is nice that the Antivirus or network protection system stops it being downloaded. It would have been preferable if it had stopped the server being compromised in the first place
After a quick search for guadaloffice.es, I have discovered that the domain appears to be totally compromised with some google warnings turning up in search results. The url redirects to https://enigma-tokens.co/
I also downloaded a different malware from http://www.guadaloffice.es/servicios/ which gave me Scans46.zip extracting to Scans46.scr ( VirusTotal) | ( Payload Security ) which looks like Shade/Troldesh ransomware
Note: over the last few days this malware campaign using the Necurs botnet has randomly delivered either Locky Ransomware or Trickbot Banking Trojan. I am not sure whether it is IP related or whether it is a time related function or whether it is purely random which victim will actually get which malware. I have only been able to get Trickbot banking Trojan today, but I am sure other victims will have received a Locky version.
eStatement-43076259.js Current Virus total detections: Payload Security | Trickbot Binary ( VirusTotal) ( Payload Security )
One of the emails looks like:
From: Bankwest <[email protected]>
Date: Thu 01/09/2021 19:22
Subject: Bankwest – You have a new eStatement
Body Content:
You have a new eStatement
Dear CUSTOMER
A new eStatement is now available for viewing.
Simply login to the Bankwest App or Bankwest Online Banking to view, download or print your statement.
Did you know? Our highly rated Bankwest App features Bankwest Easy Alerts, notifying you of important account activity and allowing you to set up payment reminders. Visit our website for more information on Bankwest Easy Alerts and the Bankwest App as some device limitations may apply.
Note: You should never click a link in an email to go to Bankwest’s site and log in. The link may not be genuine and you might be disclosing confidential access details to a third party. This email is automatically generated; please do not reply as our system will not generate a response. For telephone queries regarding Bankwest Online Banking please contact 1300 440 749.
This email has been authorised by Bankwest, a division of Commonwealth Bank of Australia ABN 48 123 123 124 AFSL / Australian credit licence 234945, Bankwest Place, 300 Murray Street, Perth, WA 6000. If you believe you should not have received this email, please contact Bankwest on 13 17 19 immediately.
Privacy Policy
© Copyright Bankwest, a division of Commonwealth Bank of Australia
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.