Bastille Day malware spammed out to French computer users

July 14th is a big day in the French calendar as it celebrates the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in 1789.

Concerts and parades are held to celebrate La Fête Nationale, marking what is considered the birth of the modern French nation.

July 14th is just a couple of days away, of course. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still time to decide what you’re going to do if you want to celebrate Bastille Day.

And it doesn’t mean that there’s not an opportunity for malware authors to take advantage.

Here’s one of a wave of spam messages being sent out to French email addresses, and intercepted by the experts in SophosLabs:

Subject: Bastille Day

Attached file: BastilleDay.rar

Message body:
Bastille Day activities .See the attachment.

The attachment is, of course, malicious.

Inside the RAR archive attached to the emails is a file called…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.