Spammers Spoil Holiday Cheer

Will the season of scams never end? You get junk mail year-round but it seems like during the winter holiday spell your inbox gets flooded more than usual. AppRiver security analysts revealed one of spammers' most recent tricks: fake Amazon orders.
Especially for those of us who want to avoid the floods of crowds at stores, Amazon and other online services offer the perfect way to buy presents. Recently the popular online retailer has been pushing its customers to do a 30-day free trial of its Amazon Prime service . Prime's benefits include free two-day shipping on all purchases and access to the Kindle Owners' Lending Library, which allows users to borrow up to one select popular book per month for free with no due date.
Free shipping is a beautiful thing for avid online shoppers, especially during the gift-giving season. It's also a great way for crooks to trick many unsuspecting users into downloading malware onto their computers.
Scammers are sending out boatloads of fake Amazon.com "Order Details" notifications. In the email, these cyber criminals tell users to open an attachment that contains order details and invoice. Opening this malicious attachment enables malware to infect all running processes on the infected machine, steal all auto-complete passwords from Mozilla Firefox, and attempt to download more malware from its server.
Luckily, a lot of these attachments are broken. Possibly made in a hurry, some of the files aren't formed properly, so the average recipient can't view the attachment, and others are just corrupted.
Just because the spammers failed to make all these fake Amazon attachments work doesn't mean you can take it easy. Don't open suspicious-looking emails, and keep track of what you order online so you know if you're expecting a confirmation email. To protect yourself against existing and future malware attacks, install antivirus software on your device; one of our favorites is Editors' Choice Norton Antivirus (2014). Be a smart shopper this holiday season; spammers are waiting for your guard to go down.