www

Últimas Notícias

Eurocentric Mass mailer talks in tongues

June 2004


New social engineering trick used

A new virus, dubbed Zafi.B, is flooding government and antivirus sites all over Hungary. Luckily, it seems that the author has no notion of how to do a proper "seeding", so the virus isn't spreading as fast as it could. The virus copies itself into probable shared folders and harvests e-mail addresses off the infected computers, and sends copies of itself to the harvested addresses.

Some nifty social engineering is used: the virus, though written most probably by a Hungarian, "speaks" 18 European languages, masquerading as a greeting card e-mail, sent in the language of the domain it is being sent to. "Users can easily fall for this ruse. It's a new social engineering technique which we'll probably see replicated by other virus writers." declared Patrick Vicol, BitDefender virus researcher.

Generally, the e-mail contains a fake link to an e-card site. You are advised to refrain from following such links, or use the removal tool provided by BitDefender if you get infected.


Share