A fake Telstra email attached with malware has been sent today to hundreds of thousands of Australian inboxes with the intention of feeding back information to external hosts.
The email - which was first sent last night and has continued throughout today - attempts to imitate a legitimate Telstra email and includes an attachment with malware-laden tools which can have potentially devastating consequences for anyone who opens it.
Fortunately for people using MailGuard the virus was identified and stopped on our end before it could do any harm.
According to our security experts the email, once opened, attempts to gather and send information from the computer to an external host.
Once the host PC has been infected, the virus identifies the geo-location of the infected computer and sends a number of requests back to the external hosts.
These requests could be used to gather personal information about the infected host or to download further tools/malware.
The virus then sends a number of requests to various other external hosts - possibly for the purpose of gathering personal information about the infected host.
Several large anti-virus providers struggled to contain the email and as a result it still reached plenty of Australian inboxes.
