This is the email I recently received. The email address and company name used in this Phishing scam have been purposely blacked out.

Another Phishing scam has turned up.

This one poses as a credit card purchase.  A fake confirming order comes in your email with an attachment.  The attachment is a zipped file.

When you download, unzip and open the “document” to read the details, your system becomes infected.

I know about this scam firsthand because it recently turned up in my email box.

At left is the email I received. I blacked out the email addresses and company names.  Unfortunately, these email scams are all pretty much the same in that any well-known company’s name can be dropped in order to disguise the email and its nefarious payload.

What’s in the attachment?  Well, as detailed, here, “The file actually needs to be renamed first as Order details.zip to be able to extract Order details.exe.  The file is detected as Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Injecter.fse by Kaspersky and poses as a PDF document. You should never trust a file by its icon, always pay attention to the file extension instead and make sure that Windows Explorer is set to show file extensions.”

This website goes on to confirm that, “As stated on (the Company’s) Facebook page, (The Company) does not send order confirmations or other unsolicited requests that require you to open attachments. If you did receive such an email, note that there are no orders or any transactions between you and (The Company).”

So, once again a legitimate company is being used by the Phisheing scammers to try an infect computers and possibly steal personal information. (Again, I’ve tried my best to omit the company name.  They are an innocent party in all this).

Whenever you receive an email tht you simply do not recognize, give it a closer look.  For instance, with this particular email, the thing that tipped me off was the email subject heading, “Succesfull_Order  300147.”   The sender added an extra “L” to the word successful.

So, when in doubt about any email, always SEARCH FIRST!  Do not download suspicious attachments.  Regularly update your anti-virus software.

And lastly, get the Windows target off your back!  Switch to Linux!  Linux is immune to Windows’ viruses, spyware, Trojans, and other nasty computer infections.