Hackers reprise boarding pass scam

Hackers are looking to trick people into infecting their PCs by emailing them fake airline tickets and boarding passes.

In a reprise of a tactic used in the summer, particularly when online booking and check in for airlines became more popular, TrendLabs researchers caught spammed email messages featuring bogus eTickets supposedly from Continental Airlines.

The message thanks the recipient for availing of a new service called ‘Buy flight ticket Online' and provides account details and a password. The recipient just prints out the attached ‘purchase invoice and plane ticket' before they use these, with an attached zip file apparently including an invoice and ‘flight ticket.'

It also claims that the user's credit card has been charged US$915, a rise compared to the summer scam where the spam message from Northwest Airlines only charged US$700.

Though Trend Micro have revealed that the archive file contains an executable file "e-ticket.doc.exe," which has been identified as WORM_AUTORUN.CTO, which propagates via removable drives and accesses websites to download other possibly malicious files. It also displays the icon of files related to Microsoft Word to avoid easy detection and consequent removal.

Advanced threats researcher Joey Costoya, said: “It's the old double-extension trick to hopefully fool the user to double-click the attachment. The phrase Your credit card has been charged…will just add more worry for the user, convincing him more to examine (read: double-click) the ‘flight details'."

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