Cisco Security Intelligence Operations has detected significant activity related to spam e-mail messages that appear to come from a personal user e-mail account.  The subject of the e-mail is just a number and the message body contains only a link.  The link directs the recipient's browser to download the file surprise.exe.  When executed, this file attempts to infect the user's system with malicious code.

E-mail messages that are related to this threat (RuleID2283) may contain a link to the file surprise.exe.

The surprise.exe file has a file size of 24,064 bytes. The MD5 checksum, which is a unique identifier of this executable file, is the following string: 0xBE712C4A1BB14317C19C5DBED3438A79

The following text provides samples of the e-mail messages that are associated with this threat outbreak:

Subject Line: 0,9604228

Message Body:  hxxp://good1soft.com? 0.8283419

The  malicious code associated with this threat outbreak shares the characteristics of a downloader trojan.  The trojan attempts to establish connections to the 195.88.80.15 and loyaldown99.com domains.  The trojan then requests a page that directs the user's browser to download the files file.exe and 161.exe, which contain additional malicious code.  The new code creates the files qmgr0.dat, qmgr1.dat, asd.bat, and ieocx.dll.  Additionally, the trojan terminates the Security Center service.  The trojan also uses the Background Intelligent Transfer Service to create a task that issues a GET request to the tube-loyal.com domain for the file videosz.php.

Cisco Security Intelligence Operations analysts examine real-world e-mail traffic data that is collected from over 100,000 contributing organizations worldwide. This data helps provide a range of information about and analysis of global e-mail security threats and trends. Cisco will continue to monitor this threat and automatically adapt IronPort systems to protect customers. This report will be updated if there are significant changes or if the risk to end users increases.

Cisco IronPort Virus Outbreak Filters protect customers during the critical period between the first exploit of a virus outbreak and the release of vendor antivirus signatures. E-mail that is managed by Cisco and end users who are protected by Cisco IronPort web security appliances will not be impacted by these attacks. Cisco IronPort appliances are automatically updated to prevent both spam e-mail and hostile web URLs from being passed to the end user.