Computer Virus Appears Originated From US CDC

If you receive an email that looks like it came from the United States Centers for Disease Control (U.S. CDC) about creating a profile for an H1N1 vaccination program, please ignore it and delete it straight away. Do not open the email and go to the link and please do not forward to anybody. It is a malware scam that is circulating in the Internet now, according to sources from security provider AppRiver.

The email should like something like this:

The fake alert informs recipients that as part of a “State Vaccination H1N1 Program” they need to create a profile on the CDC Web site. The link in the e-mail goes to a fake CDC page where the visitor is assigned a temporary ID and a link to a vaccination profile that is actually an an executable file containing a copy of the Kryptik Trojan targeting Windows, according to an AppRiver blog post on Tuesday.

The link was embedded on the webpage and looks like this:-

Once installed, “this Trojan will create a security-free gateway on your system and will proceed to download and install additional malware without your authorization,” the post warns. “It also enables a remote hacker to take complete control of your computer. This malware can log your typed keystrokes and send confidential personal and financial data (including banking information, credit card numbers, and website passwords) to a remote hacker.

According to AppRiver, the fake CDC email was dispatched at a rate of nearly 18,000 messages per minute, approximately 1 million in the first hour alone.

the fake CDC email was dispatched at a rate of nearly 18,000 messages per minute, approximately 1 million in the first hour alone.

The worst part of it is, according to Symantec, the landing page that the link led to contained a hidden iFrame that pointed to a site hosted in Ukraine. The iFrame checks to see if the system is running an unpatched version of Adobe Reader, Acrobat or Flash Player and if so it uses an exploit to download a file to the system.

Do be aware that these sort of phishing sites and emails are on the rise and there’ s no way for you to know them all, and usually by the time you know it, you’ll be another statistic in the number of victims. I recommend that if you do not have a proper firewall or antivirus software install right now, please get one immediately.

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