Endpoint Protection

Who sends greeting cards for the Fourth of July? Apparently spammers. Beware of emails with Fourth of July subject lines such as:

Subject: Celebrate Your Independence
Subject: America the Beautiful
Subject: July 4th Fireworks Show
Subject: July 4th Family Day
Subject: 4th Of July Celebration
Subject: American Pride, On The 4th

Each message contains a link to the "greeting card". The link in these cases is an exposed IP address, which is a pretty good indicator that it isn’t a greeting card from an established and reputable Ecard service . When clicked, the link delivers a downloader that accesses the Internet and downloads a Trojan onto the computer.

We've been seeing a lot of generic Ecard spam over the past month and have noted it in previous blogs. What makes this one different is that it specifically targets the July 4th Holiday. We have observed over 15 million of these messages since the attack first appeared.