“Your parking violation appeal” comes with malware.

Don’t fret if an email titled, “Your parking violation appeal” arrives in your inbox – it’s just another attempt by cybercriminals to infect your PC with malware.

In fact, it will become blatantly obvious that the email is fake once you read it (and see 20+ other people copied on it):

Subject: Your parking violation appeal.
From: Alease Maslen (AleaseMaslen@policedep.gov)

Dear [EMAIL ADDRESS],

Please find the parking ticket appeal form in the attachment to this email. Failure to submit the form within 21 days will result in $100 fine.

Traffic Penalty Council.

This is an automatically generated email, please do not reply.

The entire goal of this spam message is to infect your PC with the Gamarue.B worm that’s hiding within the attached file, “parking ticket.zip.”

Once it makes its way onto your PC, Gamarue.B will modify the registry to make sure it runs on Windows startup and open up a backdoor on your PC to download additional malware or allow an attacker to remotely control your machine.

If your computer is infected with the Gamarue.B worm, don’t connect any removable drives to it. Otherwise there’s a good chance that the malware will spread the love by copying itself to the removable drive and infecting additional machines when the opportunity arises.

Feel free to delete this email without downloading or opening the attached files and go about your day.

Image Credit: Arthur Chapman

Don’t miss out on the latest tech news and computer security alerts! Follow us on Twitter at @hyphenet,  “Like” us on Facebook or add us to your circle on Google+.