Today we've decided to share with you an interesting message that we received on one of our Skype honeypots. The message from the user "Scan Alert" warns us that our system has been infected with malware. It goes into a decent amount of detail intended to social engineer the victim into clicking on a link contained in the message.

The website pretends to do a virus/malware scan and then generates some fake results.

Any attempts to remove the fake results prompt the user to enter credit card information.

Let's check out this Scan Alert character... We did a Skype search for "scan alert" to find all related users. We can see the list of similiar "scan alert" usernames. All the usernames seem to have an automated naming convention.

To find out if those accounts came from an infected machine or directly from a malicious account user we conference called them all. ; ) (let's see if anyone picks up...)

Guess nobody's home...

This serves as example of spam propagating on Skype, with malware authors utilizing social engineering to pass their malware off as legitimate software, and attempting to collect money directly at the same time.