Continuing with the never ending series of malware downloaders is an email with the subject of RE: CLOTHING ORDER coming or pretending to come from Berhanu (PURCHASE DEPARTMENT) <[email protected]> with an attachment named CLOTHES & GARMENT ORDER JUNE 2017.ace; Ace files are a different form of compressed archive ( zip file ) that needs special software Winace to extract the contents.
Windows natively cannot open these and the most common unzipping tools like winzip don’t open these archives either. The JUNE ORDER.exe is Loki bot
The malware gang sending these have thankfully made it more difficult to be infected as so few recipients can open them.
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.
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.
CLOTHES & GARMENT ORDER JUNE 2017.ace : Extracts to: JUNE ORDER.exe Current Virus total detections: Payload Security the Loki bot C2 is at where all the victim’s stolen data will be sent
One of the emails looks like:
From: Berhanu (PURCHASE DEPARTMENT) <[email protected]>
Date: Wed 31/05/2017 04:46
Subject: RE: CLOTHING ORDER
Attachment: CLOTHES & GARMENT ORDER JUNE 2017.ace
Body Content:
Hi Supplier,
Please refer to the attached order for CLOTHING (T-shirts,Polo shirts,Tank Top,Hoodies& Sweatshirts,Caps) and revert as soon as possible
Kind Regards,
| Ordering Officer
366 Grantham Rd, Raiwaqa / Suva, Fiji Islands / Tel: 3381555
Disclaimer: Information transmitted is intended only for you and contains confidential and privileged material. Any retransmission or dissemination, or taking action in reliance upon, by persons other than you is prohibited .If you received this in error, please contact me and delete from computers. © Niranjans Group
P Consider the environment. Please don’t print this e-mail unless you really need to.
The file itself has an icon that makes it look like an adobe file complete with an invalid digital signature ( a stolen or fake Adobe digital signature)
Email Headers:
| IP | Hostname | City | Region | Country | Organisation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 74.208.4.201 | mout.gmx.com | Wayne | Pennsylvania | US | AS8560 1&1 Internet SE |
| 79.71.141.211 | 79-71-141-211.dynamic.dsl.as9105.com | Salford | England | GB | AS9105 Tiscali UK Limited |
Received: from mout.gmx.com ([74.208.4.201]:59328)
by knight.knighthosting.co.uk with esmtps (TLSv1.2:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:128)
(Exim 4.89)
(envelope-from <[email protected]>)
id 1dFubG-0000Ii-P2
for [email protected]; Wed, 31 May 2017 04:47:11 +0100
Received: from [79.71.141.211] by 3capp-mailcom-lxa07.server.lan (via HTTP);
Wed, 31 May 2017 05:46:13 +0200
MIME-Version: 1.0
Message-ID: <trinity-0a7e08af-1f4d-4cf8-949d-d559a9fdad61-1496202373064@3capp-mailcom-lxa07>
From: “Berhanu (PURCHASE DEPARTMENT)” <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: CLOTHING ORDER
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary=rehcsed-97abff59-70d3-4eaa-a28b-19e8e4ed1ec4
Date: Wed, 31 May 2017 05:46:13 +0200
Importance: normal
Sensitivity: Normal
X-Priority: 3
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All these malicious emails are either designed to steal your Passwords, Bank, PayPal or other financial details along with your email or FTP ( web space) log in credentials. Or they are Ransomware versions that encrypt your files and demand large sums of money to recover the files.
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.
There are frequently dozens or even hundreds of different download locations, sometimes delivering the exactly same malware from all locations and sometimes slightly different malware versions from each one. Dridex, Locky and many other malwares do update at frequent intervals during the day, sometimes as quickly as every hour, so you might get a different version of these nasty Ransomware or Banking password stealer Trojans to the version we list here.
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 .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.