"You've received a Telex" spam

Well, I guess if people are daft enough to think that somebody has emailed them a fax or voicemail message then this is the next logical step.

From: Telex Operator [telex@victimdomain]
To: victim@victimdomain
Subject: You have received a Telex!
Date: 1st April 2015

You have received a Telex transmission. Please be so kind as to open the attachment.

Attached is a file telex.zip which in turn contains a presumably malicious file telex.txt neither of which are detected by VirusTotal [1] [2] and the Malwr report is inconclusive.

Foolishly, one of our users opened the attachment and saw the following text strings:

00110 01101 00100 10101 11000 00111 00100 10000 10100 00110 01100 01111 00100 10000 10100 00011 10000 00100 00101 11000 11100 00001 11000 01100 00001 00100 10100 00011 00101 00100 00001 11100 00011 00110 10010 00001 01001 00100 10101 11000 00111 00100 00011 00100 01101 00011 11101 11011 01100 00100 11111 11110 11000 00110 01110 00001 11100 00011 00110 10010 00100 11000 01010 00100 10000 00001 10010 00001 11101 00100 10000 10100 00001 01100 00100 10101 11000 00111 00100 00011 01010 00001 00100 00011 00100 01101 11000 11000 10010 11011 11100 00100 11111 10100 00011 10110 10110 10101 00100 00011 10110 01010 00110 10010 00100 01101 11000 11000 10010 11011 00101 11111 00101 00100 01001 00011 10101 11011 11100

As soon as the user opened it, our own Telex machine started printing out little skull-and-crossbones characters. Now, I thought this was odd because I didn't think that the Telex machine actually had that character on.. and when I took out the daisywheel and looked closely then I couldn't find it (see image below).

Weird, huh? So, I don't know if this is a weird cross-platform cyber virus or some sort of digital incantation? I don't have much time to look now though because apparently somebody has emailed me a telegram.

(Yes, it is April Fool's day. Nobody tried to decrypt the message though!)