Beware the UPS Tracking Virus

July 22, 2008 by Roger
Filed under: computers and IT 

There’s a very nasty new virus that has just been released. Businesses that use courier services like UPS are particularly vulnerable. That’s a lot of businesses !

You can imagine how easy it could infect an office manager’s computer:

1. Office happens to be waiting for a delivery from UPS.
2. Office Manager received e-mail with virus
3. Office Manager wants to keep on top of this delivery and opens the attachment.
4. Office Manager’s computer gets infected with trojan key-logger. This happens to be the PC that does the company’s banking.
5. Keylogger records keystrokes and sends them back to virus originator.
6. Organised criminals transfer the company’s money to an off-shore account.

Here’s a blog post that explains its source and heritage.

It comes as an e-mail with an attached zip file (see picture for details below).

ups_virus.jpg

Because it has just been released, most anti-virus software won’t pick it up. That is commonly called a zero-day virus for obvious reasons.

If you get an e-mails with attached zips, and you don’t recognise the source, delete them immediately.

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Comments

3 Comments on Beware the UPS Tracking Virus

  1. Gary on Thu, 24th Jul 2008 2:20 am

    2. Just saw the email from UPS and decided to google the subject line with the word virus. The give away was the tracking number they referded to, is not a valid UPS tracking number, no letters were in it, Like 1Z_ _ _ _ etc. Now if it read a reference instead of a tracking number I may have opened it. Anyway up came the articles on the new virus. I deleted it and ran AVG & Malbytes just in case and I am not infected.

    Gary

  2. Rebecca on Sat, 26th Jul 2008 3:53 am

    3. I got three of these today, each with a different tracking “number”. I did not open the attachments, but called UPS and they told me it was a virus that would do “bad things” to my computer. Thank goodness I had not recently sent a package by UPS, or I would have opened it!

  3. Bruce on Thu, 11th Dec 2008 12:43 pm

    4. I am waiting on a UPS delivery, but was suspicious of the Sender. I checked the “UPS Number” from the Subject line without opening the e-mail. When this failed, I trashed the e-mail, and in the process my NAV detected and removed a virus. Thanks for the warning!

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