The crew responsible for operating the Gameover variant of the infamous Zeus banking trojan is soliciting the enormous Cutwail botnet’s spamming capacity as an engine to fire off millions of malicious emails that seemingly originate from a number of recognizable U.S. banks.
The fraudulent emails inform their recipients that they “…have received a new encrypted message or a secure message from” whichever bank the email purports to come from. According to Dell SecureWorks’ Counter Threat Unit, the emails claim that the bank is concerned about user privacy and has devised some secure email exchange system for its customers. Attached in the email is a file that recipients are urged to download in order to register as a first time user for the email exchange.