As if malicious emails promising freebies are not enough, some scamsters have hit upon using unclaimed parcels as a bait for sending malwares (viruses, worms and trojans) through emails. I received one such email stating that the parcel I sent could not be delivered and I had to collect from their department by printing the attached invoice. Coincidentally, I had indeed sent one parcel but later realised that it was through a different vendor and just for the heck of it went through the email.

As expected the email was indeed a malware carrier. Though the FROM address looked genuine, it had the patterns of a spoofed email id and this was confirmed when my email virus scanner detected the message attachment as having a virus.

The email states that:

From Snapshot of the spoofed email

In this case it has spoofed the email address of one of the renowned courier company.

I am beginning to think what if the database of the courier companies was compromised and indeed these scamsters started to send such emails to the genuine users. On one hand I believe the layered defense mechanism would stop it, what if the user disabled their AV (believe me I have seem some users do that)….

Ensuring your system of the following must keep your system in good stead:

– Antivirus with latest virus definitions.

-Personal Firewall

-Up-to-date with Operating System patches*

* It doesn’t matter if you have an AV and Firewall, but if its not up-to-date with Operating System patches, that’s sufficient to get your system infected and most of the people seem to overlook this.