An email with the subject of   ZKCXOLINMCH-6/20/2018 [ random numbered]  pretending to come from Sales <sales@gmail.com>   with a PDF attachment  which  pretends to be an Adobe Secure PDF and you need to click a link  to view it online.  When you click the link it instead downloads Lokibot

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.

Be aware many antiviruses don’t routinely scan pdf attachments, although some will automatically detect any PDF with a link as a potentially phishing scam and alert you. A high proportion of mail filters allow PDF attachments as legitimate, so there is a reasonably high chance of these being delivered to a recipient.

It is virtually impossible for any company to automatically block PDFs at the network perimeter, so until the link in the PDF has been previously scanned and  detected, it will be allowed through.

You can now submit suspicious sites, emails and files via our Submissions system

These do not come via Gmail. They are not sending the emails to you.  They come via either a compromised or fraudulently set up server. The alleged sending domain dujnimo.com does not exist

It all starts with the PDF attachment  VirusTotal | AnyrunApp   which has a link to http://taact.co.in/PO.exe   VirusTotal- Website detections |  VirusTotal – .exe detection |  AnyrunApp

The domain taact.co.in has been used in a lot of malware campaigns over the last 2 years) ( VirusTotal) This so called educational establishment dealing in industrial technology training needs its website cleaned up ASAP.

One of the  emails looks like:

From: Sales <sales@gmail.com>

Date: Wed 20/06/2018 06:45

Subject:  ZKCXOLINMCH-6/20/2018

Attachment:  2_4239834477.pdf

Body content:

Dear sir,

 

Attach is the new purchase order please confirm and get back to me.

 

THANKS & REGARDS

 

SUNNY GUPTA
KRIPA INTERNATIONAL (INDIA)
F-11/27, KRISHNA NAGAR, DELHI – 110 051
PH: 011 – 43015401, 22095401

 

Screenshot:

 

 

Email Headers:

IP	Hostname	City	Region	Country	Organisation
159.65.177.85		Clifton	New Jersey	US	AS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC
104.255.64.146		Clarks Summit	Pennsylvania	US	AS46664 VolumeDrive

Received: from [159.65.177.85] (port=55086 helo=dujnimo.com)
by my email server with esmtps (TLSv1.2:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:128)
(Exim 4.91)
(envelope-from <sales@gmail.com>)
id 1fVWpm-00071Z-Kc
for security@myonlinesecurity.co.uk; Wed, 20 Jun 2018 07:43:15 +0100
Received: from [104.255.64.146] by dujnimo.com with esmtpa (Exim 4.82)
(envelope-from <sales@gmail.com>)
id 1fVVvR-0004WW-L2; Wed, 20 Jun 2018 05:45:02 +0000
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=”===============0751764350==”
MIME-Version: 1.0
Subject: ZKCXOLINMCH-6/20/2018
To: Recipients <sales@gmail.com>
From: “Sales” <sales@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2018 22:45:00 -0700
Reply-To: goodlucky08033@gmail.com
Message-Id: <E1fVVvR-0004WW-L2@dujnimo.com>

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. A very high proportion are Ransomware versions that encrypt your files and demand money ( about £350/$400) 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.

 

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 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.

 

IOC:

2_4239834477.pdf
MD5 79a5aa88fc351a438aec199d23d51bfc
SHA-1 8d745b580e95fd25f3adc7e661072d5232dbc7d7

Download URLs
http://taact.co.in/PO.exe   103.195.185.104
PO.exe
MD5 be308614407f41e935ac70166a90473d
SHA-1 43fb8839d9b40773dd62baa3c4b4a1218b43ea08

Email from:
sales@gmail.com ( spoofed)
replyto: goodlucky08033@gmail.com ( possibly connected to the scammer)
dujnimo.com
159.65.177.85
104.255.64.146