Monday, October 20, 2008

Fake FedEx Email Borne Malware Alert

Over the last 24 hours we have seen a large influx of a new email borne malware campaign alleging to be a notification of non-delivery from FedEx.
The email alleges that you sent a package on July 25, but because the recipient's address was not correct when it was shipped it had not been delivered. It then asks the user to print out a copy of the attached invoice (a .zip file which contains malware) and to collect a copy of the package at the FedEx Office (address of office not given, which should be one clear indicator that something is fishy about the email).

Sample subject lines that we have seen in our Threat Operations Center include:

You Have A Package!!!
Tracking N


Volumes have been pretty high as we have seen over 21M of these fakes hit our systems within the last 24 hours, accounting for about 80% of all of the email borne malware that we have seen over that same period.

It's times like this that we are reminded that although many of the large scale malware campaigns that we now see are hosted on infected web sites, static malware distributed over email is still an active, viable tactic being employed by cyber criminals.

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