Who do you trust?

There were 2 major malware waves last week that caused a big impact.

The first one involved the Outlook Notification virus, which some major AV providers were still unable to catch even after 12 hours in the wild.

Did you install the attached file? Installing the attachment would have caused you to spam the world and probably end up listed on an RBL. Three people called me asking for help because they were blacklisted after this incident. Okay, so you can clean the infected computers and ask to be unlisted: you can get out of this mess relatively easily.

But what about the second scam? It involved an email that warned you about a webmail account upgrade and asked you to click the link to load new settings. There were several variations: you might have seen a regular text message or an image (below); it sometimes mentioned Outlook Web Access, and at other times stated simply that your mailbox settings have been changed. In all cases, the message appeared to come from someone at your workplace.

Did you click the link? If so, you won’t be able to fix things by formatting your computer, and its impact could haunt you for LIFE! According to the report in SCMagazine, clicking the link installs the Zeus trojan that sits silently until a victim visits a financial account page, such as a bank or brokerage firm.It does whatever it takes to extract credentials and personal information from you so its operator can login later and take over your bank account.

Now you’re probably thinking, EDUCATION! It’s funny but most of the time its the younger generation that educates the older one about the usage of internet/emails, and you tell them NOT to comply with any email if you don’t know where it comes from. Yep it’s true. Thats what I would have said if this were 2007. Today though, there are plenty of viruses, trojans and very sneaky emails that monitor your traffic and your address book. This behavior means the spam can insert your moms email address in the FROM field and bypass all spam scanning because your mom is in your whitelist.

We have telemarketers on the phone, unsolicited fax ads, annoying people knocking at the front door selling everything, junk snail mail, and finally, spam by email.  As long as people continue to fall for schemes by buying the products, sending personal info, and so on, spam (of any kind) will remain.