Just in time for holiday travel, hackers are spoofing airline companies in email messages containing malware.
Cybercriminals are once again sending out a number of spam messages that appear to be airline tickets. You thought going through airport security was a bad thing but not as bad as when you encounter a fake airline ticket in your email inbox that infects you with a dangerous Trojan horse.
Reports from last week have confirmed various spam messages being sent that claim to be an airline ticket conformation. The spam message is known to pretend to come from many different airline companies such as US Airways, Delta Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Virgin America, AirTran, American Airlines and others. The fake email message includes a zip file named print-ticket.zip which contains a Trojan horse identified as Troj/Inco-Zip and Mal/EncPk-GH. Troj/Inco-Zip and Mal/EncPk-GH are only the latest string of infections detected by security researchers in this new spam campaign. Other variants may have been detected in older versions of fake airline messages in the past.
Sophos posted an example image of what the typical email looks like. We have posted the image below for you in the case that you recognize the format you can take proper action to delete the message.
In this day and age everyone is looking to protect their own interest and money especially when it may come to purchasing something such as an airline ticket. Hackers have used this same tactic before in the past and have now revisited with a new spam campaign just in time for the holidays. You must remember that hackers create messages such as in the image above to trick many people including ones with common sense. Use your common sense to your advantage. Do not download any file attachments from an email message without verifying the validity of the sender or source of the email.
Do you usually get airline ticket conformations sent to your email address when you book a flight? Have you encountered a fake airline ticket email?