HR departments at risk of malware infection after unemployment benefits email spammed out

Computer users, especially those working in the human resources departments of corporations, should be on their guard against a malware attack that is spammed out via email at the moment.

Emails have been spammed out, pretending to come from Detma (the Massachusetts Division of Employment and Training), claiming that the recipient needs to supply information in order to pay benefits to a former employee.

Here’s a typical email:

Subject: Action Required - Time Sensitive Material

Attached file: Unemployment_case.zip

Message body:
A former employee(s) of your company or organization recently filed a claim for benefits with the Division of Unemployment Assistance (DUA).

In order to process this claim, DUA needs information about each former employee. You are requested to:

* Provide Wage and Separation information (Form 1062/1074)
And/Or
* Provide Separation Pay Information

If you do not provide this information, you may lose your right to appeal any determination made on the claim. To provide this information electronically, please print attached claim (file) and complete any outstanding forms.

This message may contain privileged and/or confidential information. Unless you are the addressee (or authorized to receive for the addressee), you may not use, copy, disseminate, distribute or disclose to anyone the message or any information contained in the message.

Thank You.

The email is intended, of course, to trick the recipient into opening the attached file. Inside the ZIP file is a file called Unemployment_case.exe, detected by Sophos products as the Troj/Agent-YTA Trojan horse.

If you make the mistake of running the file on a Windows computer, and don’t have good up-to-date security software in place, your PC will be compromised and hackers will be able to gain remote access to your company’s data.

And as it’s likely that HR staff are most likely to act upon the email, it could be personnel records and private information about individuals which is most at risk.

Make sure that you know the rules about being deeply suspicious of unsolicited attachments that arrive in your inbox, and to always be wary of running unknown executable code on your PC.

Even if you don’t work in a personnel department, you could be putting your own data or that of your company at risk if you are careless about your computer security.

_{Human resources image from Shutterstock.}