An email arrived here on 26 September. I see reports on the web of others about the same time:
Subject: Amazing Book
Start of Text:
Greating and salutations Friend,
Your new book has brought a lot of excitement to our editorial staff.
End of Text extract
Other reports say that the recipient had never written a book. I have but it is still in the final stage of editing before it will be ready for submission to a publisher or agent.
In any case, I cannot take seriously the opinion of someone who writes: “Greating” or “You seem to never going to quit surprising us.”
It includes a zip file with one item: a file with the title approved.doc [many spaces] .exe
This is not classified as a virus by Avast but may be by a few other engines.
Windows lists the file as an application. The icon is (similar to) a Word program. That cannot be the case since there is no copy of word on my machine, .doc files are handled by Open Office.
Is there anywhere I can send a copy of the file for analysis by Alwil/Avast.
The program has not be executed on this machine and there is no infection here.
This does seem a bit of completely pointless targeting. Most people will know if they have written a book or not and those that have will know if they have submitted it for publication. I suppose that even with that knowledge there are people who will open the zip file to see the content of the book (and the file is far too small to contain even a short book).