Cybercriminals Try Phishing With Fliers

As part of their ongoing effort to convince people to visit malicious Web sites, cybercriminals are experimenting with a new medium: phony advertisement fliers.

In a post on the SANS Internet Storm Center blog, security consultant Lenny Zeltser describes a scheme to drive traffic to a malicious Web site using pamphlets left on cars.

A few days ago, yellow fliers appeared on cars in Grand Forks, N.D., Zeltser reports. They purported to be parking violation notices and advised recipients to go to a specific Web site "to view pictures with information about your parking preferences." (If you've never heard of parking preferences, you're not alone.)

At the specified Web site, visitors found snapshots of cars at area parking lots, along with the instructions, "To view pictures of your vehicle from Grand Forks, North Dakota download here," followed by a link to a file called PictureSearchToolbar.exe.

Once installed, that program downloaded a malicious DLL and attempted to establish a connection to a Web site that Symantec said has been associated with malware.

"The initial program installed itself as a browser helper object for Internet Explorer that downloaded a component from childhe.com and attempted to trick the victim into installing a fake anti-virus scanner from bestantispyware securityscan.com and protectionsoft warecheck.com," Zeltser explains in his post. "Attackers continue to come up with creative ways of tricking potential victims into installing malicious software. Merging physical and virtual worlds via objects that point to Web sites is one way to do this. I imagine we'll be seeing such approaches more often."

Don't worry too much, though. The sentence construction in the fake Windows security alert rather ruins the scam. The alert reads like a transcription of the Russian-inflected English uttered by Chekov on the original Star Trek series: "Your system requires immediate anti viruses check!"