Targeted Email Attacks

It had to happen eventually. Luckily, my colleague is a star who is diligent about scanning all the internship applications she gets, and who is also savvy enough to see the warning signs of a disconnect between sender email/sender name and the signed name at the bottom of the email. We have a very active internship program, and she is listed as the contact on our website, so she gets quite a few applications each week. We both knew that it was only a matter of time before this became a vector, hence the diligent scanning.

So this is a fake internship application with two malicious attached Word .doc files, one named “Resume” and one named “Semester desired.” It’s actually two copies of the same file, which had already been uploaded by someone else at VirusTotal. The scanning showed detection at 8/42, or 19%.

Message
Subject: Winter/Spring Internship
Attachment MD5: 24fd4fb44d08c1a8d02dfd72155305d0
Received from: 121.32.69.44