A Really Good Way To Infect Your Computer

By | March 9, 2012

Do you have a Facebook account? Probably. About 800 million people do. Have you gotten an email with the subject line “Your Facebook seems to be hacked”? It carries with it a zipped file and in the zipped file is a Trojan (at last that’s what 21 of 42 antivirus scanners say:

See the VirusTotal report

We noticed that AVG and Trendmicro don’t seem to detect this file. All the other major antivirus programs do. So just because your antivirus program doesn’t alert you – don’t assume the file is safe. And just because your antivirus program alerts you – doesn’t mean the file isn’t safe. You need to use your common sense. if you’re not sure – check the file at www.virustotal.com – just like we did.

If you want to get infected quickly, open attachments from emails like these. We remind you — again — the number one way Trojans and Botnets find their way onto personal computers is via indiscriminately opened email attachments. Unless you’re expecting an attachment by email and you know for sure who sent it, don’t open it. Just because the “From” address appears to be from someone you know and trust doesn’t mean they actually sent it. Companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Apple, Facebook and others, do not send files by email. And with all the cloud storage sites that allow you to share files in your online storage folders, and sites like www.mediafire.com which allow you to upload files to the cloud and then allow you to share them via links to those files – there’s really no need to be sending files via email attachment anymore anyway.

With 800 million+ users, Facebook is a huge target for miscreants and criminals. I don’t have a Facebook account and the email address for our Cloudeight Facebook account isn’t the address to which this email was sent. These kinds of emails are simply mass mailings that are sent to whatever addresses the Trojan is gathering from the computers it is already infecting.

Don’t be fooled. Just because you have a Facebook account – use your head and remember 800 million others have Facebook accounts too. If you open the attachment in an email like this you’ll be risking your personal information, your credit card and bank account numbers, and you may find that your computer has been turn into a mass-mailing spam machine. You don’t want that do you?

Cloudeight InfoAve
Above: A screen shot of the email that carries the attachment that is infecting thousands of computers right now.

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