Malware aficionados are doing their best to make sure Internet users are lulled to sleep, using what appear to be benign subject titles in unsolicited emails to get their meat hooks on your passwords and banking information.
As eSecurity Planet discovered, the latest wave of Trojan-laden malware scams are particularly effective at swiping users’ log-in and password credentials to pilfer bank accounts and disseminate even more malware.
“This Trojan has primarily been designed to steal confidential information, such as online credentials or banking details, but it can be customized to gather any sort of information from the compromised machine,” Patil wrote in the blog entry.
Socially engineered malware has become the norm rather than the exception so far in 2010 as hackers have improved their infection batting average by designing malware that uses terminology and graphics that are found on popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
A new spam campaign making its way around the Internet features a credential-stealing Trojan that’s concealed in attachments with subject titles that look familiar and safe but end up stealing users’ banking and other personal information once they’re clicked on.
According to a Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) security advisory, the Trojan.Zbot arrives as a zip attachment in an unsolicited email that masquerades as something benign like a birthday invitation, a collection of photos or a resume.
The attachment file size is 119KB and, according to Symantec security researcher Samir Patil, often displays pseudo-random file names such as “lance armstrong.zip,” “pricing.zip” or “resume.zip.”