Spammed trojans posing as McAfee report

Posted by   Virus Bulletin on   Nov 2, 2006

Campaign uses security news to bypass security.

A spam campaign has been spotted, with the emails claiming to come from security giant McAfee and to contain a report on recent malware trends. Documents attached to the mails contain a new variant of the W32M/Kukudro dropper (aka Lafool). The malicious macro drops a trojan to the victim machine, which proceeds to harvest passwords and other confidential data, and pass the information on over the web.

The mails use addresses starting 'mcafee', at various domain names, and the subject lines have included 'McAfee, Inc. Reports on Adware and Spyware Growth'. The body may imply that the attached document contains a McAfee report originally sent out to press contacts in early September, which garnered some publicity for containing the statement 'Celebrities are a bigger lure than sex', a reference to the high numbers of celebrity fan sites hosting malware.

Kaspersky has reported sightings of the campaign, which has also been spotted by monitors at Virus Bulletin. Kaspersky representatives have said they do not believe McAfee is involved with the campaign; their analysis of the trojan is here.

Posted on 02 November 2006 by Virus Bulletin

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