Australian cricket team email attack

Australia’s struggling one-day cricket team is the subject of the latest attempt to trick Australians into downloading malicious trojans, according to global security vendor SurfControl today.

Emails with subject lines ‘Australian cricket team fighting for one day rankings’ and ‘Paraglider surviving storm in NSW’ have been spotted by the vendor’s Sydney-based threat analysts.

The threat is designed to capture user activity by monitoring browser activity and re-directing users to a malicious URL which contains an error message stating ‘page is not available due to traffic’, according to a SurfControl email advisory.

It then attempts to automatically download Trojans, which then download several other files.

The news follows a similar threat that emerged yesterday with the subject line ‘Prime Minister has had a heart attack’. Rob Forsyth, managing director at security vendor Sophos, said hackers have recycled yesterday’s malicious URL.

“It’s interesting but peculiar that the URL found yesterday is now advertising a block of units in Turkey. “It is now infecting computers in different areas, not sure as yet where this is intended to go,” he said.