In this economic crisis, people tend to trust the government for possible employment opportunities. Unfortunately, cyber criminals know this and use these circumstances by attacking job-related government sites.
The Ministerio do Trabalho e Emprego, or the Ministry of Labor and Employment in Brazil is being mimicked by the cybercriminals to distribute malicious files:
Figure 1. Fake Ministry of Labor and Employment in Brazil website
The link that leads to downloadable link is displayed in left bottom of the site:
Figure 2. Ministry of Labor and Employment in Brazil website
The downloaded file despacho_artigo987221.scr is detected by the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network as TROJ_BANLOAD.JMO. TROJ_BANLOAD.JMO gathers email addresses from the affected machine by looking through files with the following file extensions:
- .dbx
- .eml
- .mai
- .mbox
- .mbx
- .tbb
- .wab
The collected email addresses are saved in a text file on the affected system and then sent to a remote “drop box” through FTP. This scheme is possibly an email-harvesting technique, wherein the collected email addresses will be used for future spam runs.
TROJ_BANLOAD.JMO also connects to certain URLs to download malicious files detected as TSPY_BANKER.MOA and TSPY_BANKER.MOB. TSPY_BANKER variants are notorious info-stealers of banking-related information from affected systems.
This attack places Brazilian job hunters at risk of getting their banking information stolen, which would only worsen the affected users’ current situation.
The fake website, as well as malicious files, are now blocked and detected respectively by the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network.
