The next in the never ending series of Malware downloaders is an email with the subject of Your Sage subscription invoice is ready pretending to come from Sage which delivers Dridex banking trojan

They use email addresses and subjects that will entice, scare or persuade the recipient to read the email and open the attachment.

Sage 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.

One of the emails looks like:

From: Sage <[email protected]>

Date: Wed 25/10/2021 10:57

Subject: Your Sage subscription invoice is ready

Body Content:

Dear Client
Your Sage subscription invoice is now ready to view.
Sage subscriptions
• To view your Sage subscription invoice click here
Got a question about your invoice?
Call us on 0845 111 6605
If you’re an Accountant, please call 0845 111 1140
If you’re a Business Partner, please call 0845 111 7706
Kind Regards
The Sage UK Subscription Team
Please note: There is no unsubscribe option on this email, as it is a service message, not a marketing communication. This email was sent from an address that cannot accept replies. Please use the contact details above if you need to get in touch with us.

Screenshot:

The link in the email goes to a compromised or fraudulently set up OneDrive for business/ SharePoint site where a zip file containing a .js file is downloaded. That eventually downloads the Dridex banking Trojan

https://tailoredpackaging-my.sharepoint.com/personal/bec_tailoredpackaging_com_au/_layouts/15/guestaccess.aspx?docid=0b5a1a2799b6e419daf97f646640e195b&authkey=AduyYkbo5mf9IESLsGPE6yk

Sage subscription invoice.zip: Extracts to: Sage subscription invoice.js Current Virus total detections: Payload Security | Dridex Payload VirusTotal | Payload Security |

Email Headers:

IP Hostname City Region Country Organisation
203.116.7.90 5h.serialsystem.com Singapore Central Singapore Community Development Council SG AS4657 Starhub Internet, Sin

Received: from 5h.serialsystem.com ([203.116.7.90]:34868 helo=barracuda.serialsystem.com)
by knight.knighthosting.co.uk with esmtp (Exim 4.89)
(envelope-from <[email protected]>)
id 1e7IRP-0000at-OJ
for [redacted]; Wed, 25 Oct 2021 10:57:40 +0100
X-ASG-Debug-ID: 1508925563-0daf9c16bd454990001-M92BjV
Received: from mail.serialsystem.com ([192.168.11.92]) by barracuda.serialsystem.com with ESMTP id 8RDlkC21TRpLJFOB for <[redacted]>; Wed, 25 Oct 2021 17:59:26 +0800 (SGT)
X-Barracuda-Envelope-From: [email protected]
X-ASG-Whitelist: Client
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=simple; d=serialsystem.com;
s=MDaemon; t=1508925449; x=1509530249;
[email protected]; q=dns/txt; h=Date:From:Message-ID:
Subject:MIME-Version:Content-Type:To:List-Unsubscribe; bh=Nn3G3u
2PTG8YSA2gm3oyCnwx3bAylYb3IWdBsyfUD30=; b=Y2wFu7Ge6LSBcEwHn737oF
KZwKTXhczu0UuClf1nvTczWmySMa28fAgfaDG2tlZ+kRe21CaJ5TyTq2zrcsDtsc
B0hz46W8WJr8XHvOnzBDDK6GpI2OCApBtBifIVuny/LJN0wt644QlPy2KjRRwqP7
A4Pvnb/eWXfyVbFM91hJ0=
X-MDAV-Result: clean
X-MDAV-Processed: mail.serialsystem.com, Wed, 25 Oct 2021 17:57:29 +0800
Received: from 37.59.44.97 by mail.serialsystem.com (MDaemon PRO v16.0.2)
with ESMTPA id md50032021982.msg for <[redacted]>;
Wed, 25 Oct 2021 17:57:28 +0800
X-Spam-Processed: mail.serialsystem.com, Wed, 25 Oct 2021 17:57:28 +0800
(not processed: message from trusted or authenticated source)
X-MDRemoteIP: 37.59.44.97
X-MDHelo: 37.59.44.97
X-MDArrival-Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2021 17:57:28 +0800
X-Authenticated-Sender: [email protected]
X-Return-Path: [email protected]
X-Envelope-From: [email protected]
X-MDaemon-Deliver-To: [redacted] Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2021 02:57:22 -0700
From: “Sage” <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <20171025.0257.22150.JavaMail.glassfish@NVM-P-SUB01>
Subject: Your Sage subscription invoice is ready
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-ASG-Orig-Subj: Your Sage subscription invoice is ready
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=”—-=_Part_696edbcf732fdfdc”
To: Undisclosed recipients:;
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=Unsubscribe>
X-Barracuda-Connect: UNKNOWN[192.168.11.92] X-Barracuda-Start-Time: 1508925565
X-Barracuda-URL: https://192.168.11.63:443/cgi-mod/mark.cgi
X-Virus-Scanned: by bsmtpd at serialsystem.com
X-Barracuda-Scan-Msg-Size: 2941
X-Barracuda-BRTS-Status: 1
X-Barracuda-BRTS-URL-Found: tailoredpackaging-my.sharepoint.com (*Spam.Unknown)

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 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.