Note: The article below was published in TrendLabs Malware Blog on November 23, 2009.

Spoofed Trend Micro Email Leads to Phishing Site
by Menard Osena (Solutions Product Manager)

Trend Micro threat analysts recently unearthed spammed messages that purported to have come from Trend Micro. Targeting trusted organizations is not an uncommon technique, used by cybercriminals when carrying out spam campaigns.  In this case, the malicious URL and domain are already inaccessible.

Spammers have found a way to mimic the recipient’s email domain and pepper the email with the said domain in order to look more convincing.

See samples below:

In such an attack, traditional spam filtering using patterns alone will no longer prove effective. On the other hand, the cloud computing technology utilized in the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network, easily protects users as it detects and blocks spammed emails and malicious URLs using reputation-based ratings.  Readers are advised, as always, to pay close attention to the content of and URLs within emails.

Post from: TrendLabs | Malware Blog – by Trend Micro

Spoofed Trend Micro Email Leads to Malicious Site

I decided to post this in my personal blog so that I can add other personal insights to the article. I will gather my thoughts again and update this post over the weekend.

Special thanks to Det Caraig, Badette Irinco and Macky Cruz of TrendLabs Tech Marketing Team for the help with organizing my thoughts and polishing the article (Will link your blogsite/twitter page as soon as I confirmed the URL’s)