In June Kaspersky Lab registered an increase in fraudulent messages sent on behalf of booking services. These fake notifications imitate hotel booking confirmations or air tickets and usually contain Trojan spyware masked as bills for reservations. US video game maker Electronic Arts was at the center of a major scam last month as phishers used fake notifications in an attempt to access users’ personal accounts in the company’s online store Origin.
As a rule, fraudulent messages imitating correspondence from booking services, contained the Ursnif Trojan that steals confidential data and sends it to a remote server. It can listen to network traffic, download and run other malicious programs, as well as disable some system applications such as the firewall. The phishers who tried to access the personal accounts for Electronic Art’s Origin online store used the old trick of sending out an email saying the online store was enhancing account protection and asked the recipients to confirm they held an account.
Once again topping the list of malware spread by email was Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen. This threat appears as an HTML phishing website and sends email disguised as an important notification from banks, online stores, and software developers.
Trojan-Downloader.MSWord.Agent.z was in second place. This malicious program is a *.doc file with embedded macros that downloads and runs other malicious program. In third place was a Trojan downloader from the Bublik family – it’s main functionality is the unauthorized download and installation of new versions of malware onto victim computers.
“In June, high-profile political and sporting events were used by scammers to trick users. In the run-up to the FIFA World Cup, a huge event for football fans, phishers were trying to obtain banking information from users by asking them to participate in the competition to win tickets. Nigerian’scammers again exploited the situation in Ukraine and asked for help to transfer non-existent millions,” commented Tatyana Shcherbakova, Anti-Spam Analyst at Kaspersky Lab.