Federal Trade Commission Reports Spoofed Email
Original release date: October 30, 2007
Last
revised
: October 31, 2007
Source: US-CERT
Systems Affected
-
Any computer system can be affected when a person is a victim of social engineering, such as what can occur when malicious code is inadvertently downloaded from an attachment in a spoofed email.
Overview
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is
reporting
that spoofed email messages that appear to come from the FTC contain malicious attachments. If you open one of these attachments you may infect your computer with a keystroke logger or other malicious code.
Solution
Be suspicious
Exercise caution when opening email messages and attachments. In this case, the FTC describes the spoofed email as follows:
The spoof email includes a phony sender's address, making it appear the email is from "frauddep@ftc.gov" and also spoofs the return-path and reply-to fields to hide the email's true origin. While the email includes the FTC seal, it has grammatical errors, misspellings, and incorrect syntax.
Attackers often construct email messages and web sites to imitate legitimate organizations in order to more effectively convince you to open and execute malicious attachments or click on malicious links.
For more information about social engineering, phishing attacks, and email attachments please see Cyber Security Tips
ST04-014
and
ST04-010
Install and update anti-virus software
Updated anti-virus software can protect you from malicious code. For more information about anti-virus software and how to recover from an infection, please see Cyber Security Tips
ST04-005
and
ST05-006
.
Description
This spoofed email activity relies on social engineering techniques to convince you to open and run a malicious attachment. There is no software vulnerability involved and there is no software update to protect against this type of activity. For more information please see the FTC
report
.
References
Feedback can be directed to US-CERT.
