I have been seeing a steady trickle of these Fake SagePay subscription emails over the last few days. Until today all copies I saw didn’t lead anywhere with the links already dead by the time I had received the email. Today, either I was much quicker or the downloads and the compromised mailing list have stayed active for longer.

An email with the subject of Sage Soft Subsc pretending to come from Oxfordshire Sage Support with a link in email body which downloads a zip file containing a JavaScript file which in turn downloads Gootkit banking trojan

These all come via legitimate mailing lists that are run by Mailchimp. I am sure none of the senders are knowingly sending these and it looks like the criminals must either be using stolen credentials to log in to the Mailchimp system & send this malspam or have found some vulnerability on the MailChimp system in order to do it. All the links in the email go to the MailChimp system and are then diverted to the malware site.

I am not sure how these mailing lists got the email address these were sent to. To the best of my knowledge the recipient’s email address was never signed up to any of the organisations or companies that have been misused in this malware campaign. The criminals must just be using a set of randomly chosen email addresses that they have obtained elsewhere. It is very unlikely that the recipient’s email addresses are genuinely on these mailing lists or have subscribed to them.

Today’s one has used oxfordshiremind.org.uk. A couple of days ago they came from The Sage Group <[email protected]>; on behalf of; The Sage Group <[email protected]> ( that one was down by the time I received the email)

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.

One of the emails looks like:

From: Oxfordshire Sage Support <[email protected]> on behalf of; Oxfordshire Sage Support <[email protected]>

Date: Fri 19/01/2021 08:55

Subject: Sage Soft Subsc

Body Content:

 

Sage Subscription
INVOICE
INVOICE=INV937477
DUE DATE
26/01/2021
BALANCE DUE
875.15 GBP
Dear Client
Please follow the link to find your invoice. We appreciate the immediacy of your payment.
Get attached Invoice

Payment of this invoice will be taken by DirectDebit in accordance with your agreed terms.
Sincerely Yours,
The Sage Subscription Team

For our list to remain compliant with MailChimp’s policies, we need you to verify your subscription settings and expressly let us know you want to receive our emails. If you take no action, your address will be removed from our list and you won’t receive email from us again. To remain on our list, please confirm your subscription:
Confirm Subscription

© 2021 Oxfordshire Mind
You are receiving this email as a supporter of Oxfordshire Mind.
Oxfordshire Mind 2 Kings Meadow Osney Mead Oxford, Oxfordshire OX2 0DP United Kingdom

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Screenshot:

In this case the email link goes to https://oxfordshiremind.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a68404bc5fcce8549fac48a31&id=f704abab28&e=13b4786e1c where it redirects you to http://www.coderhm.com/enclosed_document.html?d=1 where it downloads “document invoice -ddt-g.zip”

document invoice -ddt-g.zip : Extracts to: document invoice -ddt-g.js Current Virus total detections: Hybrid Analysis | Anyrun Beta |

This malware file downloads from http://86.110.118.113/1013_cr.exe VirusTotal | Anyrun Beta | Hybrid Analysis |

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.

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. Dridex /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 or Banking password stealer Trojans.

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.