Earlier today the nice folks at SANS blogged about a malware campaign dressed up as a digital-certificate update for Bank of America. The malicious link contained the substring “bankofamerica.com” and took you to a Web page rigged to mimic Bank of America’s Web page:

If you clicked on “Update Certificate,” a certifiably nasty piece of malware was served to you under the filename sophialite.exe.
Did you install this “certificate” by accident? Worry not. We have proactively detected this file as Spam-Mailbot.m since the 5631 DATs, released on May 30. Further, we have added detection for the file that it drops into C:\Windows\system32\sdra64.exe as PWS-Zbot and memory cleaning for the same as Spy-Agent.bw.gen!mem. This will make it to the DATs after Wednesday, June 3.
The takeaway from today’s social-engineering attack: If you receive suspicious email claiming to come from your bank, please do not follow the links in it! It’s advisable to visit banking-related websites using only your bookmarks. In the second step of today’s attack, cautious users may have picked up on the deception if they noticed that the sign “Secure Area” did not complement the nonsecure HTTP URL.
Psychologists would term the tricks employed above as abuses of the “exposure effect” and “anchoring.” For some background on these terms, have a peek at my article on the psychology of social engineering in the Fall 2008 edition of McAfee Security Journal. Happy reading
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