The Wall Street Journal reports on a troubling new vector of cyber attacks - emails carrying Trojan-infected Microsoft Word attachments directed to senior executives in major corporations. The emails purported to be from an employment service and offered attachments supposedly containing information on potential job candidates. Luckily for these executives, the emails were captured by MessageLabs, an email security company, which monitors the incoming email traffic of its clients for spam and viruses.

According to MessageLabs, during a two-hour period on June 24, 514 messages tailored to senoir executives were captured. On Sep. 12 and 13, the company captured 1,100 messages in a 16-hour period. Although email security experts are well familiar with phishing, this form of attack seems to go beyond the mass-scale fraudulent emailing with the hope that even a very low response rate would yield some personal information. The new email attack has been seen in the past but in smaller numbers and mainly directed to sensitive personnel in government or military. The new attacks suggest that a fairly low-tech attack can yield an open-door access to a major executive’s computer and all the information stored on it. This potentially places high-value information, such as incoming deals, regulatory or other action, at the hands of criminals who can abuse it directly or profit from it by trading securities before the news reaches the public.

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