I am as Good as Dead

It looks like I'm dead! In fact I mighthave already been dead for a couple of weeks without even realizing it.That's if I believe the emails I've received (I've received the samemail eight separate times and counting). No, it wasn't a death threatagainst security researchers. It's an email stating that there had beena nuclear accident in Switzerland and everything is now radioactive andcontaminated. Since I live in Switzerland, I had a distinct feelingthat there was something bogus about this message. Even if I wasn'tliving here, all of the grammatical mistakes and the absolute lack ofumlauts in the message text where there should be some would have beenmy early clues that this was yet more spam.

In an attempt to prove that there was some truth to the story, thescammers provided a link to a Geocities homepage that provided picturesof the explosion and the cover-up story. If you visit that Web site asmall but tricky bit of JavaScript will redirect you to another pagethat mimics an online photo gallery. They even included cooling towersin the background image to really convince you. But, you need todownload a special plug-in in order to view the photos.

By now it should be obvious to everyone that this page’s onlyintention is to trick the user into downloading and installing aTrojan. This one is detected as Infostealer.Notos!gen by Symantec.

Once again the attackers are trying out sensational messages toattempt to fool users into installing a Trojan that is disguised as acodec or a plug-in. By all means it is nothing new, but people arestill falling for it. So, please don’t believe everything you read inemails and don’t click on everything, either.

Oh and yes I’m fine thank you, no contamination over here. (At least none that I’m aware of.)