Fake Verizon notification carries malware

A sneaky spam email campaign aiming to infect users with a banking Trojan is currently underway and is targeting mobile carrier customers, warns Microsoft.

The email purports to be coming from Verizon, and tries to make the recipient feel a sense of urgency by claiming it contains important account information from Verizon Wireless.

The message starts with the unusual greeting of “Hello Dear!” – unusual for a company, I mean – and proceeds to try and convince the users that they have to pay a rather large bill (the amount varies from $250 to over $1500).

“View all your recent bills in application materials,” says the email, and offers an attached ZIP file named Verizon-Wireless-Account-StatusNotification_#######.zip, with random numbers used in the name.

The archive contains a similarly named executable, which is detected as a variant of the Zeus/Zbot banking Trojan, and Microsoft warns that a similar campaign carrying the same payload has already been started using emails pretending to deliver a critical update for Adobe Acrobat Reader and Adobe X Suite.