E-mail scammers hiding malware in fake IRS notices
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(InfoWorld) - If you get an e-mail telling you that you're under investigation by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, take a breath before calling your lawyer. It's a scam. The IRS warned Thursday of two fraudulent schemes that use the IRS's name in an attempt to get victims to install malicious Trojan Horse software on their computers. In the first scam, the e-mail claims to come from the IRS Criminal Investigation division. It says that the victim is under investigation for filing a false tax return. An attachment to the e-mail, which appears to be the IRS's complaint, actually installs malicious software that gives the criminals access to the victim's PC. The second scam e-mail says a complaint about the victim's "business services" has been brought against them and advises that this can be arbitrated by the IRS. The "complaint" attachment included in this scam is actually a new type of Trojan Horse called Backdoor.Robofo, according to security vendor Symantec. Dispute arbitration is something the IRS doesn't do, according to Michelle Lamishaw, an IRS spokeswoman. "We're in the tax business. We're not in the arbitration business," she said. In fact, any time you get an unexpected e-mail from the IRS, it's almost certainly fake. "The IRS does not send out unsolicited e-mails," Lamishaw said. But because these e-mail messages appear to come from the taxman and relate to hot-button topics, some users may click, security researchers warn. "The use of legalese in the message content may intimidate some users into opening the attachment," wrote Symantec researcher Orla Cox, in a entry to the company's Security Response Weblog, posted Thursday. The IRS became aware of both scams over the past few days as samples of the e-mail messages were submitted by taxpayers to the phishing@irs.gov e-mail address that is used for reporting scams, Lamishaw said.
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Regulators are trying to prevent scams caused by software that computer users may not even know is on their PCs.
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The schemes have included unsolicited e-mail messages seeking money and a phony Web site capable of depositing a virus on computers.
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A new flaw has been discovered in Microsoft&#39;s Internet Explorer browser that allows malicious users to create fake sites that could lead to new email phishing scams.
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(InfoWorld) - Financially motivatedÂ malwareÂ attacks areÂ on the rise,Â with automated software packages making it easy for unskilled hackers to earn a living by sending out spam, researchers at messaging security vendor Secure Computing say. A malware kit calledÂ MPack,Â released by Russian hackers last December, allows pretty much anyone with $200 to become a master spammer because it is easy to use and exploits vulnerabilities in FireFox, Internet Explorer and Apple's QuickTime, says Dmitri Alperovitch, principal research scientist for Secure Computing. The trend that "kind of defines 2007" is the convergence of traditional e-mail with Web-based attacks, in which message recipients are prompted to click on links to malicious Web sites, rather than to download attachments, Alperovitch says. "Certainly, exploiting Web browser vulnerabilities has been common. We've seen that for a long time," he says. "Now we're seeing that capability being merged with traditional e-mail worms that sort of blanket the Internet." Information-stealing malware now accounts for 10 percent of all threats, up from 8 percent in January, new research from Secure Computing has found. Trojans comprise 63 percent of all newly discoveredÂ malware, up from 58 percent in January. SpywareÂ and phishing are also becoming more problematic as attackers use more targeted attacks to steal personal and financial information. "The barriers to entry into cyber crime have been lowered so much," Alperovitch says. "People are realizing that they can make very serious money with almost no accountability, almost complete anonymity." Quoting the analyst firm Gartner, Secure Computing's researchers say that 75 percent of enterprises will be infected by "undetectable professional-grade malware" by year-end. About 90 percent of all e-mail is malicious, but that figure will rise as the holiday season gets closer, according to Alperovitch. "There's a good chance we'll reach 95 percent, maybe higher, of all e-mails being malicious by the end of the year," he says. As the storm worm showed, the automation of online attacks is allowing the creation of more botnets, he says. E-mail delivery mechanisms are also being optimized to bypass spam filters. Unfortunately, many Web surfers are far too trusting. "If you're walking down the street and someone asks you for your Social Security number or your bank account pin, you're not going to give it to them," Alperovitch says. "Yet on the Internet, people freely give them out to anyone who sends them an e-mail message." Here are some key security trends and events identified by Secure Computing in the first eight months of 2007: -- TheÂ Storm worm,Â named after subject lines like "230 dead as storm batters Europe," and similar worms became widespread in January and the following months, with new variants being created every 15 minutes. -- A password-stealingÂ Trojan hit visitors to the Miami Dolphins' stadium Web siteÂ during the Super Bowl, when attackers took advantage of a vulnerability in Internet Explorer's rendering of vector markup language documents. -- A mass-email with pictures of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in April lured people to a Web site that hosted a zero-day exploit related to Windows' handling of animated cursor files. Microsoft released a patch to fix the vulnerability. -- More than 10,000 European Web sites hosted malware attacks in June after being compromised. "Hidden IFRAME's" were injected into the Web sites, referring visitors to malicious sites using MPack to deliver banking Trojans. -- So-called backdoor Trojans affect home users around the world, including nearly 100,000 PCs now infected by a new wave of storm malware. "The mailings that came with subject lines such as 'You've received a postcard from a family member!' directed users to Web-hosted exploits for several different vulnerabilities; they infect users' computers and attach them to the Storm family's P2P botnet," Secure Computing writes. Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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E-mail message falsely claims that tool detects, cleans up adult-related material on your PC.
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Jan Boldt can hardly believe the number of fake e-mail warnings she receives almost daily from crooks impersonating the security divisions at eBay, AOL, PayPal and other businesses. She usually deletes them without even looking.
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Don't believe everything you hear: That's message from security researchers tracking a spam scam that uses audio files to push an ongoing pump-and-dump stock scheme.
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A rash of recent e-mail scams relies on new techniques to try to fool PC users, according to e-mail filtering vendor SurfControl.
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Alternative browser features protection against online scams.
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By The News Tribune, Tacoma, Wash.  Sep. 14--That e-mail notice claiming to fight fraud is itself fraudulent.   The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. issued a special alert Wednesday concerning an e-mail asking consumers to download unknown software onto personal or business computers.
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typically e-mailed as enticements to bogus sites that endanger users&#39; systems and expose their personal information -- is limited in scope
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Information on individuals has been collected in a scam using e-greetings that appear to come from a secret admirer.
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New round of 'family member' greeting-card spam tricks recipients into visiting malicious Web sites.
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Some people have started using registered e-mail systems to prove that specific documents were sent or received.
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Challenge/response e-mails accidentally marked as spam by AOL and EarthLink.
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An e-mail disguised as a Red Hat patch update is a fake designed to trick users into downloading malware, the Linux vendor warned in a message on its Web site.