Fake Greetings Card E-mails – New Spam Tactic

E-mail spammers have pulled out from their bag of viral tricks a new way to infect your machine with malicious software. In the past three months, SurfControl's Global Threat Experts recorded a 30 percent increase in malicious e-mail threats.

According to Postini, an e-mail security company, their average 700,000 daily viral emails has increased to 35 million per day. Since July 2, Postini has seen about 275 million greeting card e-mails scam.

What does a greeting card e-mail scam do?

E-mail spammers send you an e-mail with the subject line saying you've received a greeting card from a "colleague," "friend," "family member," "mate", "neighbour," or "whorshipper". When you open the greeting card e-mail, there's a link that points to a website that secretly installs drive-by downloads of Trojans or malware on your computer.

Recently it was found out that the downloaded malicious file is called ecard.exe and is a Trojan (known as Trojan.Tibs or Trojan.Small) that seeks to download other malware components from the web.

Notice that the exploit starts installing malware immediately when you open the link and after only a few seconds first threats may appear on your system. After an hour or two there might be hundreds of dangerous parasites and this is a serious risk to your personal and financial data, as well as to your PC performance and stability.

CAUTION: If you receive a greeting card via e-mail and you don't recognize the sender, do not click on the link and it is advised you delete the e-mail immediately.

Subjects that appear on the greeting card e-mails:

You've received a greeting card from a admirer!
You've received a greeting card from a class mate!
You've received a greeting card from a colleague!
You've received a greeting card from a family member!
You've received a greeting card from a friend!
You've received a greeting card from a mate!
You've received a greeting card from a neighbor!
You've received a greeting card from a partner!
You've received a greeting card from a school friend!
You've received a postcard from a school mate!
You've received a postcard from a school-mate!
You've received a postcard from a worshipper!

A sample of the greeting card spam message: