April Storm
April Fools' Day emails contain new variant of infamous worm.
Security researchers report a new wave of spam emails being sent out. The emails, which use subject lines
such as 'Gotcha! April Fool!' or 'Surprise! The joke's on you.', contain a small piece of text, an image as well as a
link to an IP-based URI where the recipient is supposed to download the 'joke'. Instead of a joke, they will download
a rather humourless .exe file which contains a new version of the Storm worm.
The Storm worm, which is also dubbed 'Nuwar' or 'Dorf', was first seen in the early days of 2007 and has been active
ever since. The Storm botnet is believed to contain millions of infected computers.
A quantitative assessment of
the Storm web threat during 2007 will be presented by Trend Micro's Raimund Genes, Anthony Arrott and David Sancho at
VB2008 in Ottawa this October. VB2008 takes place 1-3 October 2008 in Ottawa, Canada, registration for VB2008 has now opened.
More on the current wave of Storm emails can be found at Sophos
here and at Trend Micro
here.
In the meantime, possibly inspired by Storm's
botherders, more positive news can be found at F-Secure
here and at Sophos
here.
1 April 2008
Tags:
april fools' day, spam, storm, worm.
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1 comment
Don't browsers these days give three red-flashing 'this could well be a virus!'-warning screens when you try to download a .exe file? They should. And as a non-sysadmin user in a corporate environment, one should just not be able to do that at all.
by M. Klein, 08 April 2008, 00:23
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