Red Condor Warns Of Fake eBay Security Alert

Rohnert Park, Calif. " April 1, 2010 " Red Condor today issued a warning of a new blended email threat that appears to be a security alert from the leading online marketplace, eBay. The email message with the subject line "eBay Procedural Warning " Security Alert," is addressed to "Dear eBay Member," and warns recipients that the sender has "detected security issues on behalf of your account." The email warns that to correct the issue, users "have to download and install the eBay Security Shield." The embedded link in the email actually takes user to a likely compromised site on eBay's network. On the site is a Download Now button that when executed installs a Trojan virus. After the victim installs the malware as prompted by the email, they are directed to log into their eBay accounts, which then sends their eBay log-in credentials to the scammers.

The campaign was initially detected by Red Condor on March 27, 2010. At the time, only five anti-virus engines recognized the malware. Four days later, only seven anti-virus engines had detected the malware, and only three had recognized it as a Trojan virus.

"While this is a relatively low volume campaign, the scammers have not only figured out how to circumvent the majority of anti-virus engines, they have also exploited an 'About Me' page of a compromised eBay account to host the Trojan," said Dr. Tom Steding, president and CEO of Red Condor. "In past eBay phishing attacks, the call to action URL has been on some random compromised machine. This scam, however, is a malicious and very sophisticated attack, and unfortunately, is a good representation of the types of phishing attacks that we are likely to see going forward. This attack is likely to get by many email security systems, so users should delete the message immediately."

The campaign was filtered by one of Red Condor's new sender reputation-based filters. As with all threats captured by Red Condor, once identified, campaigns are quarantined and reviewed as rules are written and automatically distributed to Red Condor's antispam appliance and Hosted Service customers.

About Red Condor

Red Condor is revolutionizing spam fighting with its next generation technology. Red Condor's highly accurate email filter, hybrid architecture Vx Technology, and fully managed appliances lead to a dramatic reduction in the cost of owning a premium spam filter. With solutions for small businesses, as well as ISPs with millions of email inboxes, Red Condor has a cost-effective, timesaving solution that is rapidly gaining market share. The system's design has built-in zero tolerance for lost email, and a near zero false positive rate while achieving long-term spam block rates greater than 99%. Red Condor Archive is a secure message archiving service with lifetime retention and unlimited storage. The company's next-generation technology is backed by a 24x7 customer care center staffed by email security experts at Red Condor's headquarters. For more information, visit www.redcondor.com.