Security Featured Article

A few days ago, while sitting at work writing away, I received an e-mail from greeting card company BlueMountain.com saying “Someone has sent you a holiday card! Click here to view.” All excited at first, I thought, “who could it be?” and starting racking my brain for the thoughtful individual who wanted to make my work day by sending me a friendly greeting.

Then, I got to thinking; who knows my work e-mail address? Not many people, that’s for sure. My gmail e-mail, yes, but my work e-mail? Not so much. So, in trusting my gut, I pressed “delete” and continued with my day.

And, boy, am I glad I did not open the card.

Sure enough, while perusing the wires today, I stumbled on this: E-mail security experts at Red Condor, issued a warning about a new e-Card spam campaign that appears to come from American Greetings' BlueMountain.com.

I sighed in relief at my gut intuition and read on.

Apparently, the e-mail, with the subject line “You received a BlueMountain e-Card!,” suggests that users need to install the Macromedia Flash Plug-in to see the complete version of the e-Card. The entire body of the email, which includes the header and footer of a legitimate Blue Mountain e-Card, is an executable. 

For those who receive this scam, if you click on any part of the message, it will launch a browser window and, depending on a user's browser security settings, may download a virus automatically with only a single click. The virus has also been identified as a banking Trojan.

Tom Steding, president and CEO of Red Condor, said that E-card scams are fairly common around the holidays, but that the reason spammers continue to return to their old tricks is because people enjoy E-cards and trust sites like BlueMountain.com. 

“However, as we have seen in the prevalence of social media spam throughout this year, people need to be guarded about what they click on in their emails,” Steding said. “Even though the email may appear legitimate, people should look for subtle things like spelling and grammar errors or if the embedded link will send them to some random web site.”

The virus was detected by Red Condor's proprietary New Domain Detector and Spam Trigger technologies. 

So, for all you E-card junkies out there like me, just be careful. 

You may be getting a nice, sweet card from your aunt. Or a detrimental virus from a scammer.