Fighting malware and spam
Melissa has users CAPTCHA'd
Spammers offer strip show for correctly completed CAPTCHAs.
Spammers have spotted a new opportunity for getting humans to help them get past the CAPTCHA tests put in place to prevent illegal use of webmail accounts: promise users a series of photographs of an increasingly scantily clad woman for every CAPTCHA they complete.
The user is offered the opportunity to see virtual stripper 'Melissa' wearing progressively fewer clothes in a series of photographs - provided they correctly complete an accompanying CAPTCHA.
According to researchers at Trend Micro the CAPTCHAs are taken from Yahoo Mail's signup screens - in completing the CAPTCHAs the recipients of the spam are inadvertently providing the spammers with webmail accounts that can be used to send more spam or for other nefarious purposes.
The striptease is part of a trojan variously named CAPTCHA.a, Captchar.a, and RompeCaptchas.A and is thought to be either part of a multi-stage attack, or encountered as a drive-by web exploit.
01 November 2007
Tags:
captcha, spammers, trojan.
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