Do Not Click (a Weird) Amazon Invoice? . . . Trojan Horse

A site member on GaryNorth’s Specific Answers described what happened to him. He had been hit by a virus. Here is what he reported.

I received an email from Amazon and it looked like the real thing. It showed that someone in Ghana had bought about $53 worth of stuff on my account. It looked like a standard email invoice/confirmation and had a link back to the Amazon site to my account. Since I have an account with them, I thought it was legitimate and I clicked the link to see what was going on with the account.

That’s when the “fun” began. I started getting messages from my anti-virus software that it had detected a virus threat and treated it but the threat kept reappearing with a slightly different file names. It also detected a couple of other threats and took care of them. I was still having problems.

Just to be sure, I ran the Microsoft Malware program (http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx). Since I was not sure where the threats were located, I did a full HD deep scan. It took almost three hours but it did find and neutralize two more severe threats.

Just be vigilant and know that these spammers/hackers are getting very sophisticated and beware. This one sucked me in and cost me about 24 hours of time to correct the problem.