Malicious hackers have begun using the recent cyberattacks against Google and more than 30 other companies as lures for launching even more targeted attacks, security firm F-Secure said in a blog post today.
The company reported spoofed e-mails purporting to contain details on the alleged Chinese attacks that contain a PDF attachment. When opened, it installs and runs the Acrobat.exe backdoor on the user’s machine.
A screen shot posted on F-Secure’s Web site showed an e-mail designed to look like it came from George Washington University. The e-mail, with the subject header ‘Chinese cyberattack,’ offered the target a review of an article on the recent attacks that the purported author had just written for the Far Eastern Economic Review.