Recently, SourceLink had an affiliate reach out with a concern about an online form that came in with the claim of “copyright infringement,” with a link to to download an Excel file with evidence supporting the infringement claim.
The language of the online form was convincing, and included the following:
Web Form Results
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Web form used: Contact Us
Used on: affiliatewebsite.com
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Company Name |
Mel |
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First Name |
Mel |
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Last Name |
G |
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Phone |
10000000 |
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How Can We Help? |
Hello, This is Melinda and I am a certified illustrator. I was puzzled, to put it nicely, when I came across my images at your website. If you use a copyrighted image without my permission, you should know that you could be sued by the copyright holder. It’s not legal to use stolen images and it’s so mean! Check out this document with the links to my images you used at www.affilatewebsite.com and my earlier publications to obtain evidence of my legal copyrights. Download it right now and check this out for yourself: drive.google.com/linktoinfectedfile If you don’t remove the images mentioned in the document above within the next few days, I’ll write a complaint on you to your hosting provider stating that my copyrights have been infringed and I am trying to protect my intellectual property. And if it doesn’t work, you may be pretty sure I am going to report and sue you! And I will not bother myself to let you know of it in advance. |
After analyzing the file, we determined that it was an attack and that the Excel file contained Trojan code hidden as a macro designed to do significant damage to any computer that opened it.
This is just a reminder to always be wary of any kind of online form that comes in. This is especially the case if there is a file attached, and/or a web URL to download a file, that comes along with it. Additionally, please be assured that the content we provide for our website templates we either pay for, or have a non-commercial license and right to use.
If you have any questions about this type of attack, or any others that you have seen, please let us know right away via [email protected].
Our best,
-SourceLink Team
