Yet another Lokibot campaign via Malspam emails. In today’s Internet based world parcel delivery messages are so common. Most of us will receive at least 1 every week, if not several each day.  Today the lure pretends to be a delivery notification from Fedex saying they need more details to clear customs. To try to help avoid spam filters ( unsuccessfully) all the email content is a single embedded image. ( We grabbed the text using an OCR software) Once again the criminals are using .ace attachments. Many common unzipping tools, including most versions of Winzip or windows inbuilt unzipping tools  do not extract from .ace files and you need more specialised software. Hopefully this reduces the infection rate.

The extracted file pretends to be a screensaver but is simply a renamed .exe. Windows will run .scr files as an executable. It is highly likely that the Document numbers in the subject & the attachment will be random and different in each copy received.

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

Fedex 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 the criminals either compromise & take over existing accounts or set up fraudulent accounts on servers in Russia to send the malspam. It is highly probable that the criminals are using the free 14 day trial service on smartape.ru / smartape.eu. There is no actual webspace set up on the account s163480.smrtp.ru which simply displays a message in Russian saying “Site s163480.smrtp.ru successfully hosted on unlimited hosting SmartApe.ru”. I have been seeing a few of these campaigns coming from smartape over the last few weeks.

The older ones are marked as disabled by administrator so smartape.ru do respond to abuse complaints.

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.

Customer Shipment Document #7826219537007B.ace : Extracts to:  Customer Shipment Document #7826219537007B.scr     Current Virus total detections:  Anyrun |

C2 is http://plateletsders.us/white6/fre.php

One of the  emails looks like:

From: recruit@s163480.smrtp.ru; on behalf of; FedEx Delivery <noreply@fedex.com>

Date: Thu 24/01/2019 01:56

Subject: FedEx Delivery: Notification AWB# 7826219537007B Shipment Invoice, BL

Attachment: Customer Shipment Document #7826219537007B.ace

Body content:

Dear Customer,
Kindly please be informed that your shipment with the above-mentioned tracking number
requires further information for Customs clearance purposes. Please refer to the
attachment for details.
You can Download and review the complete details of your order in the attachment.
Thanks for using FedEx.
FedEx Express Team
F-edEx_express@mail.com
www.FedEx.com
WARNING: Parcel would be returned if we didnt get the correct address or a response from
your customer in 48 hours.

Screenshot:

Email Headers:

IP	Hostname	City	Region	Country	Organisation
185.9.147.4	mail.shared.smartape.ru			RU	AS56694 Telecommunication Systems, LLC
127.0.0.1	Local IP

Received: from mail.shared.smartape.ru ([185.9.147.4]:34185)
	by my email server with esmtps (TLSv1.2:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:256)
	(Exim 4.91)
	(envelope-from <recruit@s163480.smrtp.ru>)
	id 1gmUSO-00042g-2j
	for security@myonlinesecurity.co.uk; Thu, 24 Jan 2019 02:09:28 +0000
Received: from [127.0.0.1] (port=55164 helo=shared-27.smartape.ru)
	by mail.shared.smartape.ru with esmtpa (Exim 4.90_1)
	(envelope-from <recruit@s163480.smrtp.ru>)
	id 1gmUEx-00DvRk-0E; Thu, 24 Jan 2019 04:55:35 +0300
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
 boundary="=_843a27f6e85efa0fe278f268a9a9e6a4"
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2019 17:55:34 -0800
From: FedEx Delivery <noreply@fedex.com>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: FedEx Delivery: Notification AWB# 7826219537007B Shipment Invoice, BL
Message-ID: <d3628ff7ac9393d552bb3ade523e0a7b@s163480.smrtp.ru>
X-Sender: noreply@fedex.com
User-Agent: Roundcube Webmail/1.1.12
Sender: recruit@s163480.smrtp.ru

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:

Main object- “Customer Shipment Document #7826219537007B.scr”
sha256 e225331199ec43c456a5129eaebdcc88003e7ade1e65326833503746b72f1a95
sha1 b54be951dd7729aa0349405e1e2900f32a59542e
md5 296b5689f921acc3a251fe1cfbc9be34
DNS requests
domain plateletsders.us
Connections
ip 103.63.2.245
HTTP/HTTPS requests
url http://plateletsders.us/white6/fre.php