Thursday, April 03, 2014

Alert: Notice to appear in court.

Today I noticed a number of emails with the subject of 'Notice to appear in court'. The emails contains in most cases a date and time to appear in the court of Ballarat, but one also contains in the court of Sydney.

I've not seen malware writers target people by using a court appearance as a tactic to get people to open the attachment, so I decided I'd highlight these emails all contain an attachment which contains malware and you should delete these emails.

As at 6:49 am Melbourne time only around a third of the email clients I checked this malware against detected the malware. The commonly used anti-virus products from Microsoft, Avast, Malwarebytes, Panda, Norman, TrendMicro and others did not identify this malware.

Keep in mind for new viruses often the only protection you have is you. New viruses will have been written and tested against a wide range of anti-virus programs to ensure they aren't detected. It then takes time for the anti-virus companies to investigate the malware, develop a solution and then distribute the solution to all their users and this can take up to 48 hours. A very large window of time for malware writers to benefit.

If you receive a suspicious attachment trust your instinct. Many people I look after who have been infected say, 'My instinct told me I shouldn't have opened that file'. Listen to your instinct. Nature has developed your instinct over millions of years to protect you and generally it does a very good job.

In MyAnswers solution 2457 I share a new approach I used recently to remove malware from a client's computer. This solution also contains the site I use to check if a file contains malware and it is very good at finding malware, but keep in mind that site still may not detect very new malware.

Kelvin Eldridge
Online Connections
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 if your require IT support.

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