McAfee: Your own fear could lead to theft of your identity!

Staff Writers
Wednesday, 04 February 2009 19:27

IT Industry - Market

McAfee's latest SPAM report warns of a scam which relies on someone’s fear of having their identity stolen and which the security company says is the latest malware campaign tactic employed by identity thieves.

In its February SPAM report, McAfee advises against clicking on emails whose subject line starts with "E-ticket" followed by a number.

According to the security company, in Switzerland it has seen a big increase in the amount of spam offering "cheap" software, and the report also highlights a downward trend in China's use of zombies for spam.

McAfee says in its report that in the E-ticket scam the message appears to confirm the purchase of a paperless airline ticket.

“This scam’s delivery method is a clever bit of social engineering that relies on the fear of having one’s identity stolen. By raising the possibility of an unauthorized credit card payment, victims might click on the attachment without first thinking through the consequences, which include opening the door to identity thieves. The .zip file contains an executable that infects the machine with the ZBot Trojan,” McAfee reports (http://www.mcafee.com/us/threat_center/white_paper.html) 

McAfee cautions that, although anti-virus (AV) engines will “catch this incarnation of the Trojan, we always recommend a policy of disallowing executable binaries to be delivered from unauthenticated inbound sources (chief among them, email). We highly recommend that administrators combine a proactive attachment-filtering policy with their standard AV engines.”