Virus-laden email exploiting the European storms

[thewayne]

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/F/FINLAND_STORM_SPAM (no idea if the url will be good for any length of time)

Virus Exploits Interest in Europe Storm

HELSINKI, Finland (AP) -- Spammers are exploiting the public's interest in this week's European storm to spread a computer virus that sends junk e-mail, computer security experts said Friday.

The malicious program, dubbed "Storm Worm," has infected at least 10,000 PCs worldwide, said Mikko Hypponen, the head of research at F-Secure Corp. The virus arrives as an attachment to an e-mail.

The e-mails' subject line - "230 dead as storm batters Europe" - refers to Thursday's storm that disrupted travel for tens of thousands, shut down power and killed at least 47 people.

"The timing is particularly clever," Hypponen said. "They are taking advantage of people's curiosity in a natural disaster that has news value."

Once the attachment is opened, the virus is installed, allowing spammers to take control of the infected PC without the victims' knowledge. The computers can then be used to send more junk e-mail or pass along personal information.

The attachment itself is usually named "Full Clip.exe," "Full Story.exe," "Read More.exe" and "Video.exe."

"What is significant here ... is the timely nature of this assault in relation to the European storm," Hypponen said. "Malware gangs are clearly using every technique and even tragedies like these to gain access to vulnerable machines."

Comments

[silveradept]

That URL will die eventually. And this particular spam is only one in a more recent trend of spam e-mails with news headlines. I kind of chuckle and say "Hey, spam is starting to be useful - it's giving headlines... people can go check out the real news themselves afterward."

But as always, spam and viruses continue to create problems. I wish people would exercise some common sense so they don't get zombificated.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

We've been receiving a lot of spam recently like this one: " AREAS OF LOW CLOUDSWITH REDUCED VISIBILITY DOWN TO 3 MILES AT TIMES." With my wife's major interest in meteorology, they occasionally get read. But since she reads via Emacs on a Mac, no chance of malware getting in through there.

[silveradept]

Yeah. Most e-mail clients that I use are smart enough not to activate anything, and I'm utterly suspicious of attachments that I don't know are coming, so I hope that I haven't done much for infection on the oft-unused Windows partition.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I do all of my "daily" email via Yahoo, so I am fairly immune. I have Thunderbird set up for dealing with job email (splitting my identity via a vanity domain), so again, not really concerned.

And someday I'll be on Mac.