iPhone 5 spam run leads to malware

The date of the release of iPhone 5 is still unknown, but that doesn’t stop malware peddlers from using it to lure in Apple fanatics. After all, didn’t a recent research discover that “Apple was actually stimulating the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith?”

In any case, let’s hope that the recent spate of fake AVs for Mac OS X has made the users a little more careful and less likely to fall for the following email that has begun hitting inboxes:

BarracudaLabs researchers have analyzed the message, and have discovered that three separate links lead to a copy of the Zapchast Trojan – a piece of malware that attempts to connect to IRC in order to receive commands from a remote host and that gives the remote attacker the keys to the infected computer.

One must admit that the email looks pretty legitimate – the “From” address is spoofed to seem like the message comes from apple.com, the images used in the email are very polished, and the entire email does conform to the general Apple aesthetic.

Needless to say, users are urged to remember that clicking on links in unsolicited emails is always a bad idea.