American Graduates in Debt Targeted by Ascesso Malware
At the time of writing, there are a number of active spam campaigns specifically designed to target graduates in the USA who are having difficulties repaying their student loans. With offers of debt reduction or complete loan forgiveness not uncommon, it is easy to see why so many recipients are tempted to open these emails. Roughly 42 million graduates in the USA collectively owe the government $1.3 trillion, which works out to a mean average of over $30,000 per graduate, and many of them are experiencing difficulties servicing their debt in the current economic climate. Nevertheless, if you are in this situation and receive an unsolicited offer of debt relief, treat the email in question as hostile until and unless it is proved otherwise.
A Gift Horse You Should Definitely Inspect Carefully
What the recipients of these spam mails are finding is not an easy path out of the jungle of debt in which they are trapped but a trojan (Trojan.Ascesso) with a payload including rootkits and malicious code that it attempts to inject into the services.exe process. In short, this is one gift horse you should definitely look in the mouth before accepting. The malicious code contained in the trojan is bad enough but there is more: many of these emails also ask the recipients to call a listed number where they will hear a message urging them to purchase iTunes gift cards worth several hundred dollars, by way of an application fee for the bogus services they are being offered.
A Slippery Slope
Any recipients who actually heed the message they hear when calling the listed number in the emails and purchase gift cards to pay the ‘application fee’ will almost certainly receive further requests for money in the near future. Having already invested a considerable sum and still believing the offer to be genuine, some may be tempted to pay again, in the hope that their student debt problems will soon be a distant memory. However, the consequence of such actions will be more financial problems not less. If you are requested to pay a fee for student debt forgiveness programs you can safely assume that the request emanates from a bogus source. While the US government does operate some debt reduction programs, it never charges an application fee to those who take advantage of them.
Secondary Attacks
Once the Ascesso trojan has been downloaded, victims’ computers are vulnerable to further attacks: variants of the malware with the capability to download further malicious components have been detected by IT security experts. If you are not sure how best to protect yourself from the possibility of being infected by this type of malware, please feel free to contact us whenever convenient. We offer a variety of class-leading anti-spam software, including cloud based spam filters suitable for organisations of all sizes, and we are always happy to provide free advice when requested. Don’t become a victim: use an effective email filter to stop unwanted messages from reaching their intended destination.