Posted by Virus Bulletin on Apr 13, 2007
Latest wave of variants followed up by further fake warnings.
Yet another wave of malware has been widely spammed out, using similar tactics to previous attacks evolving from the weather and war warnings seen either side of Christmas to waves of Valentine's messages in February, and this time followed by a second wave carrying warnings about a major virus event, with further malware hidden in an attached, password-protected zip file.
The first seeding, which started early on Friday 13th (already dubbed 'Black Friday' in some media reports), uses typical romantic subject lines, including some not previously seen, and attachments carrying yet more variants of the malware, variously known as Zhelatin, Dref, Peed, Peacomm, Nuwar and others, tweaked and repacked to evade detection. Numbers are reported to be in the millions, with some sources suggesting as many as 60 million within a 24-hour period.
The follow-up, which began some hours later, starts with a stark warning of an infection from spyware, a worm or a virus, and suggests that the user has been infected by the earlier batch. The attachment, posing as a system patch or update and held in a password-protected zip to further block detection, contains yet another trojan variant.
While detection for the various items of malware used in the attack was initially limited, vendors have been rushing out definitions throughout the day to cope with the latest variants in use.
Further commentary on the attack is available from F-Secure, McAfee, Symantec or the SANS Internet Storm Centre.
Posted on 13 April 2007 by Virus Bulletin
