Rise in spammed malware in August 2011

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Spammers are back to using spam as a method of malware delivery. The malware arrives as executables with the usual suspect extensions exe, pif, com, or packaged in ZIP files. 

Two social engineering exploits attempt to convince recipients that the file is safe. One is the old long file name trick, making the file look like a document, keeping the real executable extension out of sight at the far right.  

The other is a more recent trick. The unicode right-to-left bytes are used to display an innocent file name, while the operating system will interpret it as an executable.

 

is displayed as

 

  nameexe.doc

 

ASTPS detects these spammed malware messages.

 

 

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