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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

A heads-up on a new e-mail scam

by Marsha Ward

Feeling guilty about not posting last week, especially since no one else but Marcia did, I'm pre-dating this post. Yes, it looks like somehow it didn't come up when it should have, but I used a new Blogger tool to fool everyone. Well, not now. I've spilled the beans. I found a timely warning from Data Doctors in my email that I wanted to share:

Very few e-mail scams get past the seasoned user, but I almost fell for a very cleverly crafted message that came in this week. Tis the season to be flying, so anything that looks like an airline confirmation gets my attention (especially since others can book a flight for me on occasion). Here is what came in that almost fooled me enough to almost get me to open the attachment:

Thank you for using our new service "Buy airplane ticket Online" on our website.
Your account has been created:

Your login: Custfeedback
Your password: passNUX8

Your credit card has been charged for $406.44.We would like to remind you that whenever you order tickets on our website you get a discount of 10%!
Attached to this message is the purchase Invoice and the flight ticket.
To use your ticket, simply print it on a color printer, and you are set to take off for the journey!

Kind regards,
Ted Hensley
Frontier Airlines

======================================================

The attachment was listed as: E-ticket_N7399294.zip

Because I don't often fly on Frontier and wasn't familiar with their e-ticket process (and wasn't paying attention), I opened the zip file which had the following file in the extraction list:
E-ticket_N7399294_and_Invoice_for_N73992943442.exe

Nothing that anyone sends you should ever be an "exe" file as they are executable files (a program that will run some form of code, in this case, malicious).

This was one of the more clever attempts at infecting through e-mail that I have seen in a while and wanted to make sure everyone keeps their "eye of suspicion" out during the summer flying season!

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