Yet another PayPal e-mail scam/virus [W32.Mimail.H@mm]

Symantec Security Response ^ | 11/13/2003

[FourPeas]

The email has the following form:

Subject: YOUR PAYPAL.COM ACCOUNT EXPIRES
Attachment: paypal.asp.scr -or-
www.paypal.com.scr
Message:

Dear PayPal member,

PayPal would like to inform you about some important information regarding your PayPal account. This account, which is associated with the email address

<address>

will be expiring within five business days.  We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause, but this is occurring because all of our customers are required to update their account settings with their personal information.

We are taking these actions because we are implementing a new security policy on our website to insure everyone's absolute privacy. To avoid any interruption in PayPal services then you will need to run the application that we have sent with this email (see attachment) and follow the instructions. Please do not send your personal information through email, as it will not be as secure.

IMPORTANT! If you do not update your information with our secure application within the next five business days then we will be forced to deactivate your account and you will not be able to use your PayPal account any longer. It is strongly recommended that you take a few minutes out of your busy day and complete this now.

DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE VIA EMAIL! This mail is sent by an automated message system and the reply will not be received.

Thank you for using PayPal.

[Brett66]

Heard about this one on TechTV today.

[petuniasevan]

Tech Bump:

Worth repeating: companies that use your personal info will NEVER email you asking for account numbers and/or passwords. NEVER.

Turn in all such emails to the affected business (in this case PayPal).

You can also alert the email server's admin (though they don't usually care too much).