The next in the long, long line of never ending Locky downloaders is an email with the subject of Payment confirmation 7477 ( random numbers) pretending to come from Standard Bank <[email protected]>. Quite why they think a large number of UK residents will have a South African bank account is a bit beyond me, but of course many click happy recipients will fall for it & get compromised and have all their files encrypted.
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.
23 November 2021: PaymentConfirmation7477.zip : Extracts to: wbxz7lyfob8mwyygqstzfffj7aere8wz.js Current Virus total detections: MALWR shows a download of an encrypted file from which is converted by the script to OYxgQhzazR1.dll ( VirusTotal) Payload Security Looks like this is the same Locky payload as earlier examples today. They have used the 08yhrf3 download file name in several of today’s examples
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: Standard Bank <[email protected]>
Date: Wed 23/11/2021 15:39
Subject: Payment confirmation 7477
Attachment: PaymentConfirmation7477.zip
Body Content:
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| Copyright Standard Bank. All rights reserved. Standard Bank of South Africa Limited (Reg. No. 1962/000738/06). Authorised financial services provider. Registered credit provider (NCRCP15). Disclaimer and confidentiality note: Everything in this email and any attachments relating to the official business of Standard Bank Group Limited is proprietary to the group. It is confidential, legally privileged and protected by law. Standard Bank does not own and endorse any other content. The person addressed in the email is the sole authorised recipient. Please notify the sender immediately if it has unintentionally reached you and do not read disclose or use the content in any way. Standard Bank cannot assume that the integrity of this communication has been maintained nor that it is free of errors, virus, interception or interference. For our privacy policy or information about the Standard Bank group visit our website at www.standardbank.co.za. |
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 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.