Cant Keep Quiet!

It's official, if you get any e-mail with that subject or a similar one that is from .hk, it's trying to get you to download malware.

When I posted about this on Thursday I reported that I couldn't find anything definite. One thing I also did was send a copy of the e-mail to the Urban Legends Reference Pages aka Snopes.com.

In today's "What's New" section at Snopes.com it has information about this incident. This is what they had to say

Many web sites offer a service that allows a user to send a customized "greeting card" (or "postcard" to a relative, friend, or acquaintance, delivered as an e-mail message containing a hyperlink which the recipient follows to visit the originating site and view the card. Sending out phony e-card notifications is therefore an effective method of camouflaging viruses and inducing unwitting recipients into clicking on links that install malicious programs onto their computers.

A wave of malicious messages (like the one reproduced above) sent out in June 2007 employed that very technique, arriving in inboxes bearing subject lines such as "You've received a postcard from a family member!" in an attempt to induce recipients into clicking links that install a variant of the Storm Trojan, "an aggressive piece of malware that has been hijacking computers to serve as attacker bots" since early in 2007.

On December 29, 2006 I tired to leave a comment on a friend's blog. The comment was denied because my IP was a spammer.

A visit to a site that lists IPs that have been flagged for spamming confirmed that my IP had been flagged.

WTF!

I spent the next few hours before I went to see Lewis Black trying to track down any trojan or other program that someone could be using to send out that crap from my IP.

I found. . . nothing.

I scanned my computer for exploits…everything was clean.

I scanned my computer for AnalogX (an open proxy that cannot be made secure)… not on my computer.

Wingate? Same results. Squid? Same results.

I ran Netsky, MyDoom, and Beagle removal tools. All three worms were not found on my computer.

I ran WebDefender (anti-virus program from Microsoft), clean.

I ran SpyBot Search & Destroy and found a bunch of tracking cookies but not much else.

I paid for and downloaded Ad-Aware SE Plus and ran that program. If found a lot of suspicious possibilities mostly associated with IE.
More »« Less