[ news_security_news ]
Scam E-Mail Impersonates SpysoftCentral
Doug Caverly
Staff Writer
2006-07-21
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
If you want to keep your computer safe, be careful about accepting random offers of protection against spyware, even if they appear to be from legitimate corporations. This lesson (which many people have already learned) came out of one of the latest e-mail scams.
A message claiming to be from the SpysoftCentral anti-spyware company has shown up in more than a few inboxes. According to an article in Webuser, it was BlackSpider Technologies that first identified the problem: a Trojan is present in the attachment.
This attachment is described in the e-mail as a "detailed invoice - but when the attachment is opened, however, Trojan-Downloader.Bancos is downloaded," wrote Quentin Reade. Reade described how people were fooled into allowing the malware onto their computers.
"The text of the mail confirms subscription to one of its [SpysoftCentral's] products and the deduction of £79.39 from the recipient's credit card account," he wrote. This sort of scam is nothing new, of course.
James Kay, an employee of BlackSpider Technologies, reiterated that point when he spoke to Reade. "This is not the first time virus writers have used PC users' anxiety over spyware to entice them to open a malicious attachment," he observed. "As far as social engineering goes, I wouldn't be surprised at all if lots of people were duped by this ploy."
BlackSpider asserts that its "on-demand security services prevent current and evolving email and web threats from presenting a risk to an organisation's business continuity and effectiveness." There is also a bold statement on the site promising "total protection against email and web threat." I don't know about that, but the company did a good job of identifying this scam.
E-mail scam
Add to  Del.icio.us |  Digg |  Yahoo! My Web |  Furl
Get all the updates in RSS: 
About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for SecurityProNews, InternetFinancialNews, SearchNewz, and WebProNews.
More news_security_news Articles
Insider Reports RSS Feed
|
|
iEntry 10th Anniversary
RSS
Archive
