Yes, really! A new wave of malicious spam is proclaiming the Internet will come to an end in 2012. Obviously if this were true, spam would also come to a screeching halt. The messages have subject lines such as “Secret Plan To Kill Internet By 2012: Leaked?” and “2012: The Year The Internet Ends” and suggest a secret conspiracy is at work to kill off the Internet as we know it and replace it with a highly controlled subscription model. The claim is false of course, and the PDF attachment that comes with the spam (yes, PDF spam is back!) actually contains malware-a Trojan called Pidief.A, aka PDFex-A that quietly disables Windows Firewall and then downloads even more malware.

Like other recent spam attacks, this one uses current events (in this case the recent concerns regarding net neutrality and bandwith/infrastructure capacities. Fortunately the spammers in this case are not too bright. The attachment always has the same name and the email body doesn’t vary, making it very easy to block with your anti-spam solution.