Storm attack strikes back
Cute kitten cards cover latest wave of malware.
The Storm attack has returned with yet another wave of blended attacks, with links to the drive-by download sites of the
initial trojan spammed out under cover of humorous kitten ecards.
The ecard tactic has been a favourite of the gang behind the attack for some months now, but while earlier social
engineering tactics used claims that cards were sent by an acquaintance to celebrate an event, the latest run combines
this with the interest value of the bizarre and amusing - the links contain variations on a theme of 'check out
this hilarious card'. Following the link leads to sites hosted on zombie systems in the Storm botnet, thought to
contain several hundred thousand hosts, which attempt various exploits to infiltrate vulnerable machines.
Readers are reminded of the need to exercise extreme caution viewing ecards, especially unexpected ones from untrusted
sources, and are advised to ensure systems are fully patched and up to date, running quality security software
and ideally well-trained spam filters.
Details of the latest wave are at McAfee
here
or at Websense here.
More analysis of Storm and ecard trends are in recent blog entries at ESET
here and Sophos
here.
12 October 2007
Tags:
ecard, social engineering, storm, trojan.
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