Storm Worm sent 15 million pump-and-dump e-mails
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The Storm Worm botnet network may be shrinking in size, but it has managed to send out 15 million of those annoying audio spam messages in October, according to anti-spam vendor MessageLabs.It&#39;s hard to believe that the Storm messages were effective. Recipients had to first click on an attachment -- usually given a misleading name&#160;such as&#160;beatles.mp3 or Britney.mp3 -- to hear the stock pitch, which featured a warbly robotic woman advising people to invest in online car seller, Exit Only.This kind of scam, called &quot;pump and dump,&quot; tries to nudge up the price of penny stocks by a cent or two, giving the spammers a way to make a quick buck by selling the stock before it crashes. Spammers have been delivering their messages in different formats, including&#160;PDF and Excel files, over the past few years as part of a cat-and-mouse game with spam blockers. This&#160;move to MP3 spam&#160;is the latest development in this battle, observers say.Spam watchers say that pump-and-dump schemes are the hottest and most lucrative area for spammers today.The spam run began on Oct. 17, and lasted about 36 hours, using infected computers in the Storm Worm network to send out the mails, MessageLabs said in a statement released Tuesday. The spam sounded strange and warbly because the voice in the message was &quot;synthesized using a very low compression rate of 16KHz to keep the overall file size small, at around 50KB, to avoid detection,&quot; the company said.Storm is thought to have landed on as many as 15 million PCs over the past year, but recently&#160;its network of infected PCs has been shrinking. University of California, San Diego, researchers recently pegged it at about 160,000 computers, only 20,000 of which are accessible at any one time.Exit Only said it was not involved in sending the spam. Its stock was trading around $0.41 on Oct. 18, the day after the Storm spam started. On Tuesday it closed at $0.20.
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Sodom and Gomorrah for the information age Mother Nature may be hitting back at the scourge of spam-filled inboxes, according to IE Internet.â¦
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FRANKFURT, Germany  - A mass e-mail posing as a  plea for aid to help the victims of last month's Asian tsunami  disaster is actually a vehicle for spreading a computer virus,  Web security firm Sophos said Monday.
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A new worm has been discovered in the wild that&#39;s not just settling for invading users&#39; PCs--it wants to invade their homes too.
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At least one new variant of a worm spread rapidly from Asia and Europe to U.S. computers Friday morning, filling up people's e-mail accounts, but otherwise causing little apparent damage.
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Virus writers have created a piece of malware that &#39;talks&#39; to victims. The Amus email worm uses Windows Speech Engine (which is built-in to Windows XP) to deliver a curious message to infected users.
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bulk messages clogging instant-messaging accounts. AOL and its Anti-Spam Alliance partners -- EarthLink, Microsoft, and Yahoo
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Q: I have been receiving an increasing number of e-mail requests to participate in financial schemes that are clearly bogus and illegal.
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Storm Worm spam switches from featuring Christmas strippers to New Year messages.
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The e-mails come in a torrent now, each seemingly more urgent than the last.
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The Storm worm was part of a spam campaign that pointed recipients to a Web site wishing them a happy Labor Day, then downloaded malware.
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The flood of unsolicited e-mail hit high marks for the year last month, the security vendor reports.
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The criminals behind the Storm botnet waited until the last minute, but they&#39;ve finally started delivering unwanted Christmas presents.Starting Monday, Storm-infected machines began sending out Christmas-themed spam in yet another attempt to trick victims into downloading malicious software. In this case, the site is named Merrychristmasdude.com, and the malware is a variation of the Storm Trojan horse program that has been plaguing systems around the world since January.The e-mails contain titles such as &quot;Find Some Christmas Tail,&quot; &quot;Warm Up this Christmas&quot; and &quot;Mrs. Clause Is Out Tonight!&quot;One message reads &quot;Yo, I am pretty sure this is up your alley, from the things you have told me before. This will be the best 2 min you spend this holiday. hehe.&quot;Once the user clicks on the link to Merrychristmasdude.com, he is taken to a Christmas-themed Web site with photos of scantily clad women and offered a free download. That download is a malicious program, called Email-Worm.Win32.Zhelatin.pd by F-Secure, that connects to a P-to-P (peer-to-peer) network and begins downloading even more malware.Storm&#39;s creators have built up networks of infected PCs -- called botnets -- over the past year by using a combination of sophisticated hacking tricks to avoid detection and by spamming potential victims with clever and timely e-mail messages. The network is called Storm because its original messages offered victims video of the deadly storms that battered Europe a year ago, but has also perfected the tactic of sending out holiday-themed messages.Security experts estimate that the&#160;Storm has infected more than 15 million computers over the past year, although the current size of the network is much smaller than that.This latest variant is being blocked by some antivirus vendors, including Kaspersky, Microsoft and Symantec, according to a technical write-up of the Christmas outbreak.The SANS Internet Storm Center recommends that administrators block Web and e-mail access to the Merrychristmasdude.com domain.
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The Storm Worm has infected so many machines that it's now one of the most powerful supercomputers.
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Beware of any e-mail claiming to come from "frauddep@ftc.gov"--it carries a nasty payload.
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A new version of the Zafi e-mail worm is spreading seasonal greetings along with its malicious code, according to antivirus software companies.
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A new worm has been discovered in the wild that&#39;s not just settling for invading users&#39; PCs - it wants to invade their homes too.