Infected by Papered Fax

With today’s technology, there are so many ways to get infected by malware. But did you know that you can also get infected by a good old-fashioned paper fax?

Anyone with a fax machine knows how annoying certain businesses can be: they ignore the phone calls and frustrated pleas of office administrators and keep on sending their junk.

Here’s a typical example. If you look closer at the advertisement, notice the line that says To be removed from our list: www.re******.co.cc. Great “ but not so fast! The first thing I did was check the URL. My security watchdog told me the IP address was malicious and had been blocked, so I decided to check the source using a good old command line script to see what’s inside the site. Guess what? There was a Trojan downloader on the page.

So there you go – a new trick for an old dog: the business spams you using the fax, refuses to remove you from its list, adds an unsubscribe URL that points to a malicious site, and ultimately infects people who don’t have any security software on their machines.

By the way, more than 30% of businesses don’t have security software on their workstations. Do you?