Be cautious if you get an email inviting you to update your Adobe Flash Player.
It could be a new Trojan horse, which is spreading via email. The message contains a link that redirects unsuspecting people to a malicious web session when their browser is opened. The bug changes users' home pages before redirecting them, according to Microsoft, which by Thursday had received 70,000 reports of the bug.
You should be able to detect the scam, however, according to internet security company Kaspersky Labs' blog Threatpost. “There are several clues something is amiss, namely part of the GUI for the supposed Flash 11 update is written in Turkish, and there is no scroll bar on the EULA,” it points out.
Clicks on the link and a regular Flash Player dialog box pops up, minus the sroll bar. Highlighting the text takes you to the bottom of the message, where you are told that the home page will be changed. The install button is written in Turkish, and clicking it will take you to a malicious site. A Microsoft anti-virus researcher told Threatpost: “These sites appear to be a type of search engine, but there are pop-up advertisements displayed on the pages, and there was an instance where I was redirected to a different page not of my choosing."
Apart from this, Get Safe Online notes that software update notifications – including those from Adobe – pop up automatically rather than in an email.
