IT Queries: Computer problems answered

Help! I’m being overwhelmed by emails offering free Auto Identification Cards and confirming air tickets with airlines I’ve never heard of.

Do not open the attachments on these emails!

This is a nasty little piece of malware known as the Ztob Trojan, it pulls all the tricks in the book including disabling firewalls, anti viruses, spamming your inbox and, finally, stealing your credit card details.

Using emails claiming to be spurious airline ticket bookings to spread the thing shows how devious the malware writers are. While it reminds us of the Anna Kournakova virus of 2001, the motives are totally different. It shows how things have changed in the last seven years and today viruses are written by organised crime to rob you.

We need to be careful with these things this Trojan is rapidly being rewritten by the malware designers and many antivirus programs are having trouble keeping up with the changes. We do have some discussion about this in our PC Rescue newsletter.

Do not open anything with a .Zip attachment unless you have confirmed with the sender this is a legitimate file.

Sadly there’s not a great deal we can do about these emails as the spammers are ahead of the curve on this one. All we can suggest is keeping your security software up to date and practice safe computing.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.