New Coronavirus Strain? Nope, Just Hackers Trying to Spread Malware

[duddy]

New Coronavirus Strain? Nope, Just Hackers Trying to Spread Malware

 

              PhotoCredit: NurPhoto via Getty

The hackers have been using files and emails that warn about a new coronavirus strain to trick users into opening them. Doing so can secretly deliver malware to the victim's machine.

 

Received a random file about the coronavirus? It's best to avoid opening it. Hackers are starting to exploit fears around the ongoing outbreak to infect computers with malware, according to security researchers.

 

The attacks have been occurring through files and emails that pretend to know something about the coronavirus, but have actually been designed to take over the victim's computer.

 

On Wednesday, the hackers were spotted sending out spam emails to users in Japan, warning about a new strain of coronavirus reaching the island country, according to IBM Security. The emails, which are written in Japanese, urge the recipient to open up the attached Word document to learn more.

 

If macros are enabled, the opened document will be able to execute a series of commands to secretly download the Emotet malware, which can steal sensitive information from your machine or deliver other dangerous payloads, such as ransomware.

 

The email pretends to come from a disability welfare service provider:

 

 

"This new approach to delivering Emotet may be significantly more successful, due to the wide impact of the coronavirus and the fear of infection surrounding it," IBM Security said in the report. "We expect to see more malicious email traffic based on the coronavirus in the future, as the infection spreads. This will probably include other languages too."

 

On Thursday, the security firm Kaspersky Lab also reported uncovering malicious files disguised as documents about a new strain of coronavirus. To deliver the payload, the hackers were using PDFs, MP4 files and Word documents.

 

"The file names imply that they contain video instructions on how to protect yourself from the virus, updates on the threat and even virus detection procedures, which is not actually the case," Kaspersky Lab said. In reality, the discovered files contained a range of different malware threats capable of destroying, blocking modifying and copying data on the victim's machine.

 

"So far we have seen only 10 unique files, but as this sort of activity often happens with popular media topics, we expect that this tendency may grow," said Kaspersky malware analyst Anton Ivanov in a statement. On Friday, the security firm updated the number of detected malicious files to 32.

 

Source

 

 

[Karlston]

1 hour ago, duddy said:

As a matter of fact (may be due to my browser's inbuilt affinity) what I can differentiate between the "Before" and "After" version is only the existence of one additional 'Line Spacing' between successive paragraphs effected by using the "Enter" button. That's all. Do you observe any more inconsistencies other than this line spacing in your browsers?

Kindly tell if so.

 

The best advice I can give is to try and make the posted article layout look as close as possible to the web-site article, while being aware that it's not possible to make it look exactly the same.

 

Proper paragraphing just makes an article much easier to read. A big splotch of text is hard to read.

 

Also, take some time to look at the presentation of other News articles posted here by long-time posters such as Mach1, steven36, and me. Open the source link and compare. Believe me, it takes time, experience, and making mistakes to learn how to present posts well.

[Matrix]

Many off topic posts removed..