Trojan.Malscript

Trojan.Malscript is associated with an email scam which targets its victims with a false report of a severe pandemic. Hoping to take advantage of the widespread panic caused by the H1N1 virus and popular movies such as Contagion, one standard email scam involves attempting to convince victims that an epidemic is happening in a specific location. The subject line of this batch of scam email is 'Epidemic in [Location]' continuing with warnings that there is an epidemic spreading throughout the population and that the government is attempting to cover it up. Then, the email continues by claiming that an embedded link within the email will take them to a website containing instructions on how to avoid becoming infected. ESG security researchers strongly recommend against clicking this link, since it will infect your computer system with a malware infection that is often detected as Trojan.Malscript.

Believing this Scam Email will Set Off a Trojan.Malscript Pandemic in Your Computer

Apart from understanding that the epidemic claimed in this email is completely fake, it is also important to understand that clicking on the embedded link results in a Trojan.Malscript infection. Clicking on the link leads directly to an attack website that will attempt to exploit security flaws within your Internet browser in order to force your computer to run Trojan.Malscript. Instead of infecting its victims with malware originating from an attached file, attacks in 2011 have increasingly relied on this kind of attack instead. In fact, email scams containing malevolent web links have risen more than forty percent in 2011. This is probably also due to an increased awareness among computer users that attached files in unsolicited emails will usually contain malware. It is important to understand that this is also true for embedded links.

The Trojan.Malscript Scam Is Similar to a Previous Epidemic Scare

This kind of scam is nothing new. Malware analysts saw a rise of scam emails similar to the Trojan.Malscript scam email during the swine flu scare, the H1N1 virus scare, and the West Nile virus attacks in southern Texas. While the Trojan.Malscript Trojan was not associated with these previous scares, malware infections such as the Conficker virus or variants of the Trojan.Zbot have also been spread through false epidemic scares such as this one. If you have fallen prey to the Trojan.Malscript infection, ESG security researchers strongly recommend checking your machine for spyware using a reliable anti-malware application.