Zombie makers turning to fake greeting cards

The next e-mail greeting card you get may come with a nasty surprise. According to Internet security vendor SurfControl, attackers are increasingly using fake e-mail greeting cards as a way of getting malicious software installed on computers.

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In fact, the amount of malicious e-mail being disguised as e-mail greeting cards is up about 90 percent from last year and now makes up more than half of all malicious e-mail being sent, according to Paris Trudeau, a product marketing manager with SurfControl.

The number of "phishing" attacks, in which users are tricked into entering personal information on fake Web sites, also is on the rise. But increasingly, attackers are looking for ways to trick users into downloading software that can be used to take over a computer, turning it into a so-called zombie machine, she said.

Often this can be done by sending an e-mail greeting that entices users to click on a maliciously encoded Web page, Trudeau said. Another such trick is to mask an e-mail message so it appears to originate from the user's IT department, she said.

Overall, malicious e-mail was on the rise during the second quarter of 2005. SurfControl said its e-mail filters tracked about 30 percent more such messages than during the same period last year.