Has the Hello Darling Trojan arrived in your email yet?

by Graham Cluley on November 3, 2009 | Comments Off

Filed Under: Malware, Spam

Sophos's spamtraps are intercepting a new Trojan horse being widely distributed via email, using the disguise of photos from someone who claims to be an admirer.

The malicious emails have the following characteristics:

Subject: Hello Darling

Message body: Hi, how are you? My photos Which I promised in attached file

Attached file: photo.zip

Hello Darling email attachment malware

Make sure you don't make the mistake of opening the attached file, however, as it contains the Troj/Agent-LQH Trojan horse. Users of Sophos's gateway products will also have been stopping the malicious campaign as spam.

There may be many people who get quite a kick of being sent photos out-of-the-blue from someone they've never heard of before (especially if they call you "Darling"), but this is just the latest social engineering trick being used by the bad guys to trick you into running their malicious code.

About the author

Graham Cluley is senior technology consultant at Sophos. The readers of Computer Weekly voted him security blogger of the year in 2009 and 2010, and he pipped Stephen Fry to the title of "Twitter user of the year" too. Which was nice. He was also named "Best Security Blogger" by the readers of SC Magazine in 2011. You can subscribe to Graham's updates on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and circle him on Google Plus for regular updates.