Happy Father's Day Trojan

Be careful opening emails offering an online Father's Day card.

According to Mary Landsman of About.com, the email may be a variant of the Zapchast Trojan. Zapchast is a particularly nasty piece of work that initiates an IRC session that allows a criminal to take remote control of your machine.

I haven't seen a copy of this email myself, but Mary says the threat can be identified by "poor spelling, lack of an identified sender, and a link that may or may not be visible". In the visible link version, the link ends in ".exe".

You should avoid clicking on *any* link ending in exe, unless you're fully-aware of the consequences.

Authentium antivirus technologies detect all known variants of Zapchast, so if you're using one of our products, or behind an email gateway that has our technology installed, you're fine.