Fake updates and phony postcards carry malware
Microsoft patch and greetings card spams bring more trojans.
Several spam runs posing as vulnerability alerts from Microsoft have been spotted in the last week, with
links to supposed patches in fact leading to malware downloads. Since then, a resurgence of the trojans dubbed
the 'Storm Worm', seeded in several waves earlier in the year, has also been bombarding inboxes around the globe.
The fake Microsoft alerts have all referred to bogus Security Bulletins, a tactic not helped by the release
of a genuine bulletin last week. Most of the emails spammed out have been reasonably easy to spot, however, with
the usual poor spelling and grammar giving the game away. Microsoft has also pointed out that it never includes
direct links to download executables in its alerts.
Over the weekend, several runs of variants of the 'Storm Worm' have been spammed out, continuing into today,
with subject lines promising 'ecards' or 'greetings cards', and some using links resembling those used by
semi-legitimate greeting card sites, but the downloaded files are typically variants of the
Peacomm/Nuwar/Luder/Dorf malware which made considerable headlines earlier in the year, starting shortly
after Christmas with references to major storms in Europe as lures.
The latest variants are being spammed out and hosted by systems infected in previous runs, and attacks include
techniques to adjust vulnerabilities used to infiltrate systems based on which browsers are thought to be in use.
Suggestions have been made that the latest run is a response to the
Mpack-based outbreaks centring on Italy recently, which have been
known to disable or uninstall Storm-type malware, while Storm zombies have apparently been involved in
DDoS attacks on the Mpack-ware seed sites, according to a report in
The Register.
More details of the Microsoft bulletin spams can be found
here (from Sophos)
or here (from Mary Landesman at About.com), while
Storm worm info is here (from SANS Internet
Storm Center) or here
(from McAfee). SANS also has some follow-up information on sites compromised to carry Mpack-created
malware in the recent attack, here.
02 July 2007
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