An E-Mail That Deserves To Be Deleted

I got an e-mail yesterday that was obviously an attempt to infect my PC with something. A few years ago that something would very likely be a run-of-the-mill virus.

These days however, it is more likely to be some kind of trojan program that would allow some hacker somewhere to turn my PC into a spam generating zombie or something like that.

As you can see, the message is an attempt to make me believe that my system is infected with a worm program. At that point I suppose I am supposed to panic and believe that the attachment the sender of the e-mail has thoughtfully attached will rid my PC of the worm and all will be well.

It’s fairly obvious that English is not the native language of whoever it was that authored this literary masterpiece, and that’s a very revealing clue that tells us what this character is really up to.

Looking at the details of the header information that arrives with every e-mail message sent on the internet, I could see that this message originated on a server in Saudi Arabia.

That does not mean the sender of the message was someone from that region however. It’s possible that it could be some cyber-based al-Qaeda wannabe’s or something, but could also be hackers from just about anywhere simply using a compromised mail server that happens to be located in Saudi Arabia.

If you ever receive an e-mail message like this, the one and only thing you want to do with it is to delete it. No reputable company will be sending updates to you as an e-mail attachment. Instead, they would direct you to their web site where you could download the updates yourself.

If I can find the time I might attempt to analyze the attachment and try to figure out what it actually is. If I do, I will report back here with the results.

Update: The nasty bit of programming attached to this e-mail message included something known as “I-Worm/Stration,” which apparently harvests e-mail address from the PC’s it manages to infect. I suspect the addresses are then used for spamming. The program may also have the capability to download other nasty programs from the internet and install them on your PC. How charming.