Heads-up: IRS Spam Now in the Wild

Heads-up: IRS Spam Now in the Wild

Must be the season for social-engineering spam, because if you thought this was bad, get a load of what just showed up in my inbox:

IRS spam.png

This is a well-done ploy on many counts: it appears to be from the IRS, implicates my employer, looks official, and logically follows tax season. The attachment, a Word DOC, was opened without incident on my Mac, but the document showed an embedded object foreign to my operating system (OSX Leopard), so there was no issue.

Deeper research shows that it quite possibly might be a trojan horse that installs a virus; if you read the comments in the previous link, you’ll see different delivery mechanisms. Some are PDFs, some ZIP files, some DOCs. Regardless, it seems as if the object, regardless of its wrapper, installs some sort of malicious payload.

Be careful. This ploy was clever enough to get past SpamAssassin, so I’d guess most antispam definitions don’t have this one in their tables yet.

If you’ve received anything like this, post it below so others can understand what’s floating around out there.

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