Sophos has been intercepting many spam emails containing a malicious attachment overnight.
The emails all claim that “your internet access is going to get suspended”, as the recipient has committed “illegal activities” such as pirating software, movies or music.
The emails, which say they come from the “ICS Monitoring Team”, claim that a report of the user’s activities in the past six months is attached in a file called user-EA49943X-activities.zip.
However, if you open the contents of the user-EA49943X-activities.zip file you risk being infected by a malicious Trojan horse designed to communicate with remote hackers. Criminals can then break into your computer and use it for their own money-making purposes.
Sophos is identifying the malicious files seen being used in the campaign so far as Troj/Meredrop-A and Troj/Agent-HQK. Users of other anti-virus products would be wise to check their vendor to see if an update is available.
With so many people suffering from internet addiction (also known as ‘discomgoogolation’), it’s not hard to imagine how many people would react to receiving an email like this.
Not only would many people be prone to clicking before thinking at the accusation that they have been engaged in illegal activities, but also a disturbing proportion would be alarmed about the prospect of not being able to surf the internet.
If you receive this email in your inbox and you feel your palms begin to sweat and you can sense that your mouse finger is getting trigger-happy to open the attachment, ask yourself whether you have your priorities right in life.
Shouldn’t your head be ruling your decisions rather than the evil daemon inside you which demands you constantly feed your addition to all things internet?
