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August 17, 2011

Maybe this will turn into a "One Trick Per Day" series after yesterday's malware attachment con. Today I'm in trouble for a speeding ticket in New York (uh huh):

I'm sure that many recipients of this message are incensed at being accused of a traffic violation, most likely in a place they haven't been in some time. This will, um, drive them to open the attachment, rather than examine the message for the various errors. The two most egregious are:

• The forged header's date is one day before the alleged offense. Now that's one helluva radar gun. It's clairvoyant.
• They fail to supply the city and ZIP code in the mailing address. Moreover, they're probably referring to Chatham, not Chatam.

My email client failed to show the attachment as a clickable entity. Perhaps there is an error in the multi-part coding. But from the message's source code, I see that the attachment in the copy I received is named Ticket-064-211.zip.

As the crook assembled the forged header, he did go to the trouble of making it appear as though the message originated in an IP address block owned by a New York government agency (although for New York City). Of course, I doubt any New York agency would use an email server in the middle of Russia.

So, it's just more of the same with, I'm sure, more yet to come.