Continuing with the never ending series of malware downloaders is an email with the subject of DHL Shipment Notification : 1860915879 pretending to come from DHL Customer Support <[email protected]>

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.

Although the email headers appear to show DHL as the actual sender, it is unlikely that DHL itself has been compromised. It is far more likely that they are being spoofed. But we cannot completely rule out them being hacked or having had their email or other servers compromised. It is possible that a remote authorised user has been compromised and are genuinely using the DHL API interface to send these.

Update: It has been confirmed the references to DHL in the headers were spoofed. The servers mentioned were decommissioned some time ago and are no longer in use.

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.

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.

_Dhl_expr._DATE201703.zip: Extracts to: invoice.pdf201703.js Current Virus total detections: MALWR Payload Security shows a download using PowerShell from ‘http://sillo.net/1002.bin’ which is renamed by the script to a random numbered .exe file and autorun from the user temp folder ( VirusTotal) which is inconclusive what malware it is. ( Payload Security )

Update: I am reliably informed it is Ursnif banking Trojan

The js file is very heavily obfuscated and full of so much extraneous junk that manual analysis would take far to long to perform and I am relying on the online sandboxes to discover the content. MOst email .js files are between 1 kb & 12 kb so a 59kb js file is not as common.

One of the emails looks like:

From: DHL Customer Support <[email protected]>

Date: Thu 30/03/2017 14:58

Subject: DHL Shipment Notification : 1860915879

Attachment: _Dhl_expr._DATE201703.zip

Body content:

Notification for shipment event group “Delivered ” for Thu, 30 Mar 2017 14:57:31 +0100.

AWB Number: 1860915879 Pickup Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2017 14:57:31 +0100 Service: N Pieces: 2 Cust. Ref: G Description: DOMESTIC EXPRESS
Ship From: Ship To:
NBL S. A. NA * – 49796 NA
EVENT CATEGORY Thu, 30 Mar 2017 14:57:31 +0100 – Shipment delivered – Signed By – M C

Shipment status may also be obtained from our Internet site in USA under http://track.dhl-usa.com or Globally under http://www.dhl.com/track

Please do not reply to this email. This is an automated application used only for sending proactive notifications

You are receiving this email because a notification is configured to receive notifications from Proview.

Screenshot:

DHL Shipment Notification

Email Headers:

IP Hostname City Region Country Organisation
188.10.132.34  host34-132-static.10-188-b.business.telecomitalia.it Spresiano Veneto IT AS3269 Telecom Italia S.p.a.
165.72.200.96  gateway1f.dhl.com CZ AS2571 DHL Information Services (Europe) s.r.o
199.40.166.93  Prague Hlavni mesto Praha CZ

Received: from host34-132-static.10-188-b.business.telecomitalia.it ([188.10.132.34]:55127)
by knight.knighthosting.co.uk with esmtp (Exim 4.88)
(envelope-from <[email protected]>)
id 1ctaZt-0007ib-Va
for [redacted]; Thu, 30 Mar 2017 14:57:30 +0100
Delivered-To: <[redacted]>
Received: from gateway1f.dhl.com ([165.72.200.96])
by mxcmd10.ad.aruba.it with bizsmtp
id Y64TXZqZFnyX9vR9OdKARw; Thu, 30 Mar 2017 14:57:31 +0100
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed;
d=dhl.com; l=1913; s=20140901; t=1479116374;
h=date:from:to:message-id:subject:mime-version;
bh=J8HuF71dQ6hFZ1KWNetz7/ciOhaY3CxDZdOUSwfXpgA=;
b=ScwND3h3ZOKJfKFN9GuuIE58i2B7WMPL0CO33tGa654M+0ugE6OUbWZz
Hb/l/HoxEuiiqqAMnN+XtoymMJkWAel3fA7P+Wdr3VCRNgH/5wMd3mWRO
Q894qbB6Slhpt6iQKkQT2GPr6NwEJ1bfUwniVw7Fwg+5g/AXo8r1USZ12
H3EBSvBlMnrSw2MluaeFU80B07LR7tvyknTi4skZwu+esfiJ0EhRTjQkS
chRXe0gYYBj+x/mFOAAZutgAC5wnXEKcFJclUkpjIw1uBT6qYy4wGYABk
dlxm2w+6G9PHcYCUu7OLfS7WiCia7PvENIgHnlMxfse3MgyqRuUDJgabp
w==;
Received: from mykulls2590.apis.dhl.com ([199.40.166.93])
by gateway2e.dhl.com with ESMTP; Thu, 30 Mar 2017 14:57:31 +0100
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2017 14:57:31 +0100
From: DHL Customer Support <[email protected]>
To: <[redacted]>
Message-ID: <8926213088.957178.6969165965393.JavaMail.gpvadm@mykulls3444.apis.dhl.com>
Subject: DHL Shipment Notification : 1860915879
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary=”—-=_Part_910077_061325180.6767370968023″

Note: Only the final IP address outside of your network in the Received: fields can be trusted as others can be spoofed

All these malicious emails are either designed to steal your Passwords, Bank, PayPal or other financial details along with your email or FTP ( web space) log in credentials. Or they are Ransomware versions that encrypt your files and demand large sums of money 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.

There are frequently dozens or even hundreds of different download locations, sometimes delivering the exactly same malware from all locations and sometimes slightly different malware versions from each one. Dridex, Locky and many other malwares do 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 to the version we list here.

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.