An email with the subject of  Reminder: Invoice 101309 from Leslie J Thorpe Ltd  [ probably  random numbers and possibly random names]  coming from Leslie J Thorpe Ltd  <intuit@mail-quickbooks.gq>   with a link to download zip attachment  which contains a .js file which downloads some sort of malware  Gozi / Ursnif / ISFB banking trojan

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.

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QuickBooks 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. What is happening is that the criminals are registering a series of look-a-like or typo-squatted domains on the .GQ domain.

These domains are administered by Freenom who give them out free to any scammer or criminal on the planet along with the .ml domains also used in these criminal scams delivering all sorts of malware.

In similar campaigns using this email template, we have seen dozens if not hundreds of companies being imitated and used. Last night we saw British Gas used as the lure using an identical email template.

The delivery chain starts with a link in the email to http://mail-quickbooks.gq/270418704885762425 which redirects to and downloads the zip with a js file from https://happynewarea.ml/  These are part of the BlackTDS malware delivery chain this is actually downloaded via a javascript write from http://178.32.67.9/270418704885762429/invoice_0101309.zip

invoice_0101309.zip : Extracts to:   invoice_0101309.js      Current Virus total detections:  AnyrunApp | Hybrid Analysis|

This malware file downloads from http://generalcare.info/EdXyZ/cluster.bin ( VirusTotal)   I am not certain what malware this is. Gozi / Ursnif / ISFB banking trojan

One of the  emails looks like:

From: Leslie J Thorpe Ltd  <intuit@mail-quickbooks.gq>

Date: Fri 27/04/2018 12:14

Subject: Reminder: Invoice 101309 from Leslie J Thorpe Ltd

Body content:

Leslie J Thorpe Ltd
INVOICE
101309 DUE DATE
23/04/2018 BALANCE DUE
£7,178.59
View invoice

Payment for this invoice is now overdue. We will be instructing our collections team to recover these funds as payment has not been received.

With kind regards,

Leslie J Thorpe Ltd

0208 302 3602

Intuit, Inc. All rights reserved.  Privacy | Security | Terms of Service

 

Screenshot:

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.

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