Users warned of 'Tony Blair hacked' email

By Steve Malone

Posted on 9 May 2005 at 14:58

Users have been told to beware of a spam email doing the rounds that claims to originate from the BBC and give details of Tony Blair's email address.

According to security firm, Sophos, the email appeared on election night with the subject and body 'BBC: Tony Blair email account hacked!' Anyone who opens the email lays their machine open to a series of attacks from Trojans. The malicious code is programmed to steal sensitive personal information including bank details.

'Clicking on the link takes users to a website which invisibly installs a Trojan horse on the victim's computer,' explains Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. 'This Trojan horse then attempts to install other malicious code onto the infected computer and install password stealers which can be used by hackers for grabbing sensitive information and bank account details.'

Sophos says that one of the Trojans, Troj/PWSAgent-A, attempts to steal INETCOMM server passwords, Microsoft Internet Explorer FTP passwords, Outlook account manager passwords, and POP3, HTTP and ISP email addresses. Additional code used in the attack includes Troj/JDownL-A, Troj/Viper-A, Troj/Viperjs-A and the Troj/Dumaru-BE banking Trojan.

Cluley continued. 'The computer underground knew that many in Britain would be following the latest political news, and have deliberately created a bogus story about Blair's email account being hacked to lure people into clicking on their malicious link.'

Given the size of the attack, it's curious that the hackers made an error in the email. The message is crafted to show a picture of Tony Blair taken from the BBC website. However, an error in the HTML code means that only the text of the message is displayed.

As ever, the advice is not to open the email and to keep your computer's security software up to date.