With year end nearing, festive e-greetings have become the next source of malware attacks.

According to an F-Secure report, a number of Christmas and New Year cards (malwares) are hitting mail in-boxes globally. These fake cards are serving as cover for malicious downloads.

The X'Mas fakes come with links embedded in emails that direct users to fake Yahoo! greeting card Web sites, running in conjunction with American greetings.

These fake Web sites flash requests to download the latest Adobe Flash Player, which actually happens to be a malicious software named macromedia-flashplayerupdate.exe.

F-Secure has detected this file as an Agent variant that collects various types of information from infected machines, sending it to malware authors via a Web site.

Spotted here