“Free McDonald’s meal” spam leads to malware

Spam campaigns offering free stuff are usually rather effective, and the latest one touting a free breakfast at McDonald’s on the 27th of June is likely to reel in many victims:

There are quite a few variants on the email going around.

Subject lines vary from “We invite everyone to the day of free food” to “Tasty and free food for each visitor”, and the emails seem to come from a variety of (spoofed) McDonald’s addresses – assistance/help/helping/manager/support/information@mcdonalds.com.

But they all contain a zipped attachment that it supposedly the invitation that will get the victims their free meal, and they are encouraged to download it and print the zipped file. A perceptive user will notice that even thought the file is equipped with a Microsoft Word icon, it is actually an .exe file.

According to BitDefender, it is a downloader Trojan that tries to download and install additional malware and a backdoor on the affected system.