Similar attacks have been directed against the spouses or other family members of senior executives, in an attempt to compromise their home computers, MessageLabs said in a report out yesterday.
The UK-based security service provider said that on one day in June it intercepted 500 attacks that were targeted directly at senior executives at several organizations.
The attack came in the form at a Word attachment, perhaps purporting to be an invoice, containing a Trojan that, when the attachment was viewed on an unprotected machine, would compromise the PC.
Almost a third of the would-be recipients were chief investment officers, over one in 10 were CEOs, and the remainder were a mixture of C-level, director-level and manager-level executives.
MessageLabs said that these attacks use the job title of the intended recipient in the subject lines. The company believes this information has been extracted from social networking sites such as MySpace and LinkedIn.
Similarly, family members have been targeted based on their relationship with these executives, according to MessageLabs’ findings.
While this would be clearly concerning to executives that want to protect their family from the attentions of malicious hackers, it could also lead to compromised intellectual property, which could be sold or used for blackmail.
