You just accepted an audio letter! v8p pretending to come from WhatsApp with\u00a0 a zip attachment\u00a0is another one from the current bot runs which try to download various Trojans and\u00a0password stealers especially banking credential stealers, which may include cridex, dridex, dyreza and various\u00a0\u00a0Zbots,\u00a0cryptolocker, ransomware and loads of other malware on your computer. They are using 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.<\/p>\n
Almost all of these\u00a0also have a password stealing component, with the aim of stealing your\u00a0bank, PayPal or other financial details along with your\u00a0email 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.<\/p>\n
All the alleged senders, companies, names of employees\u00a0and phone numbers mentioned in the emails are all innocent and are just picked at random. Some of these companies will exist and some won\u2019t. Don\u2019t try to respond by phone or email, all you will do is end up with an innocent person \u00a0or company\u00a0\u00a0who have had their\u00a0details spoofed and picked at random from a long list that the bad guys have previously found.\u00a0 The bad guys choose companies, Government departments and organisations \u00a0with 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The email looks like:<\/p>\n
Savion Dale<\/p>\n
13 May 2015:\u00a0 72katheryne.zip : Extracts to:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0montag.mp3\u00a0 _______________________________________.exe\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Current Virus total detections:15\/55<\/p>\n
This is another one of the spoofed icon files that unless you have \u201cshow known file extensions enabled\u201c, will look like a proper\u00a0mp3 file instead of the .exe file it really is, so making it much more likely for you to accidentally open it and be infected.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong>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 \u201clook at this picture of me I took last night\u201d 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.<\/p>\n The basic rule is\u00a0NEVER\u00a0<\/strong>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 \u00a0love to send us pictures of them doing silly things, or even cute pictures of the\u00a0children or pets.<\/p>\n 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. Most ( if not all) malicious files that are attached to emails will have a faked extension. That is the 3 letters at the end of the\u00a0file name. Unfortunately windows by default hides the file extensions so you need to\u00a0Set your folder options<\/strong>\u00a0to \u201cshow known file types. Then when you unzip the zip file that is supposed to contain the pictures of \u201cSally\u2019s dog catching a ball\u201d or a report in word document format\u00a0that work has supposedly sent you to finish working on at the weekend, \u00a0you can easily see if it is a picture or document\u00a0& not a malicious program. If you see\u00a0.EXE or .COM or .PIF or .SCR<\/strong>\u00a0at the end of the file name\u00a0DO NOT<\/strong>\u00a0click on it or try to open it, it will infect you.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t infect you, provided you don\u2019t click it to run it. Just delete\u00a0the zip and any extracted file and everything will be OK. You can always run a scan with your antivirus to be sure.\u00a0There 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<\/strong>. If you right click any suspicious zip file received, and select\u00a0extract here or extract to folder<\/strong>\u00a0( 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 guaranteed way to get infected. The best way is to just delete the unexpected zip and not risk any infection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You just accepted an audio letter! v8p pretending to come from WhatsApp with\u00a0 a zip attachment\u00a0is another one from the current bot runs which try to download various Trojans and\u00a0password stealers especially banking credential stealers, which may include cridex, dridex, dyreza and various\u00a0\u00a0Zbots,\u00a0cryptolocker, ransomware and loads of other malware on your computer. They are using…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":13446,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","_kad_post_transparent":"default","_kad_post_title":"default","_kad_post_layout":"default","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"default","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"default","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"footnotes":""},"taxonomy_info":[],"featured_image_src_large":["https:\/\/myonlinesecurity.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/caution-malware.jpg",1000,707,false],"author_info":{"display_name":"myonlinesecurity","author_link":"https:\/\/myonlinesecurity.co.uk\/author\/myonlinesecurity\/"},"comment_info":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myonlinesecurity.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16987"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myonlinesecurity.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myonlinesecurity.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myonlinesecurity.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myonlinesecurity.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16987"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/myonlinesecurity.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29124,"href":"https:\/\/myonlinesecurity.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16987\/revisions\/29124"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myonlinesecurity.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myonlinesecurity.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}