Phishing for Fanboys with Phony iPhone 5 Images

There is no such thing as a trivial detail when it comes to the impending release of an Apple product and scammers are well aware of this. A recent attack is exploiting the public’s fascination with all things Apple and the ubiquitous interest in anything iPhone 5-related with an email phishing scam that includes a file that claims to contain pictures of the unreleased iPhone’s battery but actually contains a malicious Word document.

There is no such thing as a trivial detail when it coiPhonemes to the impending release of an Apple product and scammers are well aware of this. A recent attack is exploiting the public’s fascination with all things Apple and the ubiquitous interest in anything iPhone 5-related with an email phishing scam that includes a file that claims to contain pictures of the unreleased iPhone’s battery but actually contains a malicious Word document.

Symantec reports that the attackers are distributing the malicious Word document promising to contain images of the iPhone 5’s battery via an email titled, ‘iPhone 5 Battery Images Leak!!.’ The email, in poorly crafted English, claims that ‘9to5Mac’ has published an image of what appears to be the next iPhone’s battery.

Researchers have uncovered samples of the malicious document that exploit a recently patched remote code vulnerability (CVE-2012-1535) in Adobe Flash Player. The Word doc contains a hidden, malicious .swf file that, while executing itself, drops more malicious files onto its host.

Symantec observed the files on Adobe Flash Player 11 Active X, version 11.0.1.152 and reports that the .dll files dropped are being detected as ‘Backdoor.Briba’ and ‘Trojan.Mdropper.’

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