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July 4, 2007

Security experts around the globe are warning Internet users of a malware offensive being spread by spam posing as a July 4th greeting card. Sophos Security says that the emails, which are hitting in-boxes worldwide, claim that the recipient has been sent an e-card greeting by a friend and tells the user to click on a link to view the card.

Overall, some subject lines used in the malicious spam campaign include:

America the Beautiful

God Bless America

Happy Fourth of July

Independence Day Celebration

July 4th Fireworks Show

Your Nations Birthday

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos said "many cyber-criminals today have no qualms at all about taking advantage of celebrations like July 4th to seriously infect innocent people's computers and potentially steal their identities."

He added "this is not just an American problem. These kind of attacks strike around the world and at any time, and are designed to abuse computers on a global scale."

Clicking on the link in the email, which is in the form of a numeric IP address, takes surfers to a compromised zombie computer network hosting the JSecard-A Trojan.

This malware then tries to download additional code from the Internet which Sophos intercepts as Mal/Dorf-C.

"Rather than being sent to a real e-card website when you click on the link, you are visiting someone else's compromised computer which is hosting some very malicious code designed to seriously infect your Windows computer," explained Cluley.

"It is these same computers, based all around the world, which are spewing out spam," added Cluley.

"A real e-card company is unlikely to send you emails which contain links that are a set of four numbers in the format of an IP address, so that should set alarm bells ringing instantly."

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Source: Vnunet

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