Fake Amazon Kindle receipt leads to persistent malware

Amazon customers buying e-books for their Kindle or other mobile devices should be careful with emails that seemingly containing receipts for their purchases, warns Webroot, as malware peddlers have once again started a spam campaign impersonating the e-commerce giant:

I doubt that the attackers have managed to compromise an Amazon database and exfiltrate user information such as name and billing address (if they had, we would have heard about it by now), so the bogus and random information contained in the “receipt” could trick some users into following the offered links to their accounts in order to discover how the mistake happened.

Those who do will land on compromised pages hosting the Blackhole exploit kit, and upon successful client-side exploitation, will be infected with a variant of the Kryptik Trojan.

The Trojan in question infects local and network Windows platform computers, hides running processes, prevents AV software to be updated and work as it should, and is in general a very persistent piece of malware.

Once again, users are advised never to follow links contained in unsolicited emails and to check and access their online accounts via the legitimate login page.