Broken English email can lead to an infected PC

We've been seeing a fair number of emails in our traps today, written in rather poor English:

Hello, you remember me? We with you had a rest, here about which I told photos to you, see attach zip file

Attached to the email (which has the subject line "Greetings") is a file called document.zip.

If you're a regular reader of the Clu-blog then you should know the drill by now. It would be risky to open the email attachment as it's bound to contain malware, right?

Bingo. You got it. In this case Sophos identifies the Trojan threat as Mal/EncPk-LE or Troj/ZipMal-F.

But there are some folks out there, some of whom may be friends or business colleagues of yours, who don't have your Peter Parker-style spider-sense and don't have alarm bells ringing in their head when an unsolicited attachment arrives accompanied by some glaring grammatical errors.

Indeed, they might find the broken use of English endearing and compelling evidence that the message could be from an exotic stranger to your shores.

And that's one of the reasons why it's such a good idea to have all of your email systems, web gateways and desktop computers protected by anti-spam and anti-virus software. Sometimes your spider-sense will let you down when you need it most.