Malicious Ecards Spread Viruses

A while back I wrote about how ecards can be used for both phishing and for entering malicious code onto a recipient’s computer.

One such email is displayed below - the website links are live in the original, and designed to be clicked by the person reading the email notification. Doing so does not lead to an ecard for you read though.

Subject : You have just received a virtual postcard from a family member!

You can pick up your postcard at the following web address: http://www2.postcards.org/?a91-valets-cloud-31337

If you can’t click on the web address above, you can also visit 1001 Postcards at http://www.postcards.org/postcards/ and enter your pickup code, which is: a91-valets-cloud-mad (Your postcard will be available for 60 days.)

Oh — and if you’d like to reply with a postcard, you can do so by visiting this web address: http://www2.postcards.org/

(Or you can simply click the “reply to this postcard” button beneath your postcard!)

We hope you enjoy your postcard, and if you do, please take a moment to send a few yourself!

Regards,

1001 Postcards

http://www.postcards.org/postcards/

Instead, the links point to servers that host a whole range of nasty and malicious malware, including more recently the Storm worm which is designed to hijack the computers it infects, in order to allow them to be used in a bot network.

Zombified computers in such a bot relay can be used for sending out spam emails from your ip address or for even worse purposes!

Of course a lot of ecard sites are quite genuine and can be tremendous fun.

Just think carefully before opening up any emails from such sites that you have not heard of and check hyperlinks in emails very carefully to ensure they are taking you where you think they are.

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