April Fool's Day Prompts Malicious Spam Messages

Today's April Fool's holiday gives spammers a chance to use the day to their advantage. Spammers have used the obvious keyword in the subject line of their spam messages to read 'April Fool's Day' drawing attention to internet users all over the world. The likelihood of a computer user opening an email titled 'April Fool's Day' on today's date, which is April Fool's day, is very common. The spammers know this and have jumped on the bandwagon of spamming people all over the internet.

Trend Micro, a security company, has already identified the spam messages as having an April Fool's image which was taken from a simple Google image search using the keyword 'April Fool's Day'. The image is not original in the since that the spammer did not created it.

Contained within the spam message image that was so cleverly stolen from a Google image search is an embedded hyperlink to a malicious website that downloads executable files so appropriately named foolsday.exe, funny.exe and Kickme.exe. The names of the executable files are known to change to other names so detection may be difficult. Trend Micro has already taken action to block the website or websites that download the harmful executable files for their customers.

The spam message image resembles below.

This threat may not be as intense as others that spring up during other popular holidays but it proves how sneaky spammers and hackers are with the use of a holiday for their malicious acts. Internet users should always educate themselves of the newest threats especially around a holiday when spam messages utilize the name of the holiday to infiltrate computers on the internet for self gain and malicious intent.