March 2011
8 posts
3 tags
November 25, 2009 - Fake Email on Defense Issue
I have a saved Google search that scans for certain phrases appearing online. Today, it came across this post on the Contagio malware dump website that I hadn’t seen before. The post concerns an email supposedly “from” my boss, using a gmail account he doesn’t control, writing to someone about an important issue - something that we have been actively working on for a long...
7 tags
March 24 - Fake Red Cross ("World Nuclear...
Another not as targeted as normal email, but still interesting. The subject line trumpets “Warning!! World nuclear disaster” and the email itself purports to link to a research report on how “Japan’s nuclear radiation will cause great disaster in the near future, including US. Europe, China etc.”
The link in the email to the “research report” is to a zip...
7 tags
March 15, 2011 - Fake Wikileaks
Ok, this wasn’t as targeted as normal, but I found it amusing.** It’s an appeal supposedly “from” Wikileaks to download a .zip file with information about the Japan earthquake and tsunami. But it’s also playing on fears of war in Asia: “After the earthquake will once again revive Japanese militarism, China, South Korea, North Korea, Southeast Asia will once...
4 tags
March 2, 2011
I got this email over night. Unusually, it’s a malicious Excel file attachment (coverage at Virustotal is 18.6%), not the normal Word or PDF file. The supposed “bio” (silly to try to pass of a .xls file as a biography) is for a prominent researcher at CSIS. Mr. C won’t be attending any more meetings. He is now retired from DSCA (the organization within the U.S. DOD that...
5 tags
March 1, 2011
My colleagues both got this email, but I didn’t. It’s a forward “from” a State Department email, supposedly itself forwarding information about important Taiwan government contacts in an email from Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I have no doubt that the information in the email text is correct, but there is also an attached .rar file that is malicious...
4 tags
December 16, 2010
A “Happy New Year” greeting sent directly to me, supposedly “from” a prominent Taiwan researcher at CSIS. I know this person, but I also know that he has been used as the sender of these types of emails before, poor guy. And the writing style is nowhere close, of course. The fact that it’s about two weeks early for a Happy New Year’s greeting is another clue....
3 tags
December 9, 2010
This was a weird one, also sent directly to me. It looks like it could be a copy of a real email sent from a staff member of a Congressperson, sending along a resume for consideration. Obviously not a real email, as the greeting is for “John” not me. It contains a malicious Word file attachment. The sender is from a yahoo address, mimicking the normal house.gov style of email...
5 tags
December 2, 2010
I got this email “from” my boss, telling me “How about having a meeting tomorrow?” It then asked me to download information about the meeting in a zip file from a yahoodaily.com location online and provide my opinion. Apart from the fact that the email had terrible grammar, this would be so outside the range of normal interaction between us that it’s just silly. But...
