We have recently seen a resurgence of Dridex Banking Trojan in UK. Today continues with an email spoofing Intuit / QuickBooks with the subject of Invoice 00341 from Gas Safety Plus ( random numbers and random companies) pretending to come from the random company in subject line  <[email protected]> with zip attachment  which delivers Dridex banking Trojan

These do not come from the genuine Intuit company but are addressed to come from a look-a-like domain global-intuit.com which was registered yesterday  by a Chinese entity with what is almost certainly false identity and currently has no IP address associated with it . All the ones I have seen seem to be actually coming from various IP numbers on the OVH SAS network using fake, spoofed or newly registered domain identifications :

  • 193.70.50.59
  • 193.70.117.190
  • 176.31.130.77
  • 176.31.130.74
  • 51.254.63.185
  • 91.121.114.211
  • 92.222.182.70
  • 94.23.58.107

These are all random, but quite believable companies.

Some of the subject lines & companies include:

  •  Invoice 00476 from Gaswise (Lincoln) Ltd
  • Invoice 00845 from Moss Florist
  •  Invoice 00668 from Linda Leary Estate Agents
  • Invoice 00475 from Urban Merchants, Your Fine Food Supplier
  • Invoice 00969 from Ballon Wise

 

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.

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.

13 December 2016 : Invoice.zip : Extracts to: Invoice.js  Current Virus total detectionsMALWR shows a download from http://195.238.172.213/~iceskate/images/manual.pdf  which is not a pdf but a renamed .exe file It gets renamed by the script to PPqFp2Bl32.exe and autorun ( VirusTotalPayload Security

One of the emails looks like:

From: Gas Safety Plus <[email protected]>

Date: Thu 01/09/2016 19:22

Subject: Invoice 00341 from Gas Safety Plus

Attachment: link in email body

Body content:

Gas Safety Plus

Invoice 00341

Due date 14/12/2016

Balance due 335.00

View invoice

Dear Customer, Here’s your invoice. We appereciate your prompt payment. Thank’s for your business! Gas Safety Plus

Intuit. Inc. All right reserved. Privacy | Legal

The links in the email body goes to a hacked / compromised fraudulently set up sharepoint address

Screenshot:  None

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.