Outbreak: USPS or Royal Mail package email delivers malware attack

SophosLabs has seen a widely spammed-out malware campaign today, designed to trick unsuspecting computer users into infecting their computers with a Trojan horse.

The messages use a variety of subject lines, and appear to contain adaptions depending on whether the criminals believe they are targeting a British or American computer user (Brits are lured into opening the attachment with an email seemingly from the Royal Mail, whereas American-based recipients may believe the message is from USPS).

The wording can vary, but here are some examples of both the USPS and Royal Mail versions of the malicious email:

Contained inside the ZIP file is a Trojan horse, detected by Sophos products proactively as Mal/Bredo-Q.

The malware is only capable of infecting computers running Windows.

If you are one of the many people seeing this malware attack in your email today,…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus 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 security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.