This malware spam with a trojan embedded in the attachment is making it way through cyberspace. http://malwaresurvival.net/...

Given all the music we created using many sources, I thought it was something to read and heed. Checked the spam grapevine before opening. This was pretty good bait, almost got me.

These kinds of email rely on the idea that the person receiving such a “dramatic” message would act first before thinking.

They are also working the percentages game. If they send a million of these emails, they are guaranteed to catch some people that might fall for it.

Some advice which might help in this and similar scams:

If you use a free email service (gmail, live, etc) and you get any email stating they were made aware of you via your IP address, you can be 99.9% sure this is false. There is virtually no connection between your free email service and your internet connection. They could find out your email address provided by your service provider (usually after obtaining court orders) but your service provider couldn’t give them your free email address as they wouldn’t have it. Also, if this was genuine and they went through the courts etc, they would have your postal address and would send you a hard-copy and not an email.

I’ll contradict myself here and say it is possible for a court order to be used to make your ISP give out details of connections and other data which might provide your free email address but this would be extremely difficult and not 100% guaranteed to work. However, your postal address is very easy to obtain as it is sitting there on the ISPs’ database and is connected to your assigned IP address and the time period which this address was allocated.

You can also check the headers of any email to see if it actually came from the place the email states.

You can Google “How to trace fake emails” or something similar but here’s a site I found in a couple of seconds: http://www.irongeek.com/i.p... WoT rated it as OK and looks ok to me so I included it here.

You can also copy a section of the email and paste that into Google. You will usually find lots of results from places like urban legends and other scam reporting sites.

One last thing though.

If anyone calls you on your phone and says they are from your Electric/Gas/Water supplier or your Bank/etc/etc… Never tell them the name of the company. It is common for people (without thinking) to blurt it out. For example:

Caller: “Hello, I am calling on behalf of your bank.”
You: “What, HSBC?”
Caller: “Yes, I am calling on behalf of HSBC.”

If they don’t know the name… its a scam.

And… never ever trust anyone that says “I’m from (some name) and we have had reports that your Windows computer is infected with a virus.”

This is a scam which will get you to install a trojan horse on your computer which allows them to control and obtain all keystrokes and data that’s available. Many many people have already fallen for these things.