Valentine's Day-themed Storm worm attacks detected
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A Valentine&#39;s themed outbreak of the Storm worm has been detected. Malicious e-mails are being received across the globe -- they contain a Web link, which directs users to a Web site where they can supposedly download a Valentine&#39;s card, but in fact are infected with&#160;the Storm bug.&#160;The virus mirrors the fake Christmas and New Year messages seen in previous months.According to Greg Day, security analyst at McAfee, the virus will try to steal personal information from your PC, bring down its security defenses and use your PC to send out millions of junk e-mails.&quot;There are about 10 million PCs worldwide infected with the Storm worm. These threats have suddenly spiked from 0 percent of all spam e-mails to 1.5 percent and they are continuing to rise as we draw closer to Valentine&#39;s Day and more people are fooled into downloading the malicious file,&quot; he commented.&quot;With all the hype that surrounds Valentine&#39;s Day, it was only to be expected that they (the people behind Storm) would use a similar tactic and exploit people&#39;s eagerness to receive Valentine&#39;s cards,&quot; added Diego d&#39;Ambra of e-mail security company&#160;SoftScan.PC Advisor is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Some clever, sexy Christmas-themed spam and a long holiday season helped the criminals behind the notorious&#160;Storm Worm&#160;more than double their network of infected PCs over the past few weeks, security experts say.Storm kicked off its holiday spam-and-malware campaign on the day before Christmas, sending off a flurry of e-mail that invited victims to visit a&#160;Christmas-themed strip show&#160;on Web sites such as Merrychristmasdude.com. Victims who downloaded the strip show found their PCs attacked by malicious software.This site, and about 14 other Storm-related domains, was registered using a Russian domain name registrar called Nic.ru, where staff was largely unavailable during the holidays, according to Richard Cox, the chief information officer with the Spamhaus anti-spam effort.&quot;The trouble was they were quite simply out to Christmas lunch,&quot; Cox said. &quot;And they didn&#39;t get back until Wednesday.&quot;Spamhaus representatives tried to contact the registrar on Dec. 26, but they soon discovered that the company was essentially shut down. Four days later they received an e-mail from a Nic.ru employee saying that they would have to wait until staff returned to work in January before anything could be done, Cox said.Storm&#39;s creators took advantage of another common problem in the domain name registration system. They targeted a registrar that did not have an established policy for taking down malicious domains, so that gave the criminals a little more time to run their scam, Cox said.By Wednesday of this week, Nic.ru had removed the Storm-related domains from its database, knocking the criminal network&#39;s Web sites offline.But now security experts say that Storm has more than doubled in size, adding about 25,000 PCs to a network that had been 20,000 strong.Storm&#39;s creators also changed the configuration of their malware, making it harder for security software to detect it, and this helped inflate the number of infections, Cox said.The Christmas campaign was &quot;pretty effective at growing the botnet,&quot; said Jose Nazario, senior security engineer at Arbor Networks. &quot;The contributing factors there were clearly the successful timing, tied to a major Western holiday, coupled with tweaks to the malware to avoid antivirus detection.&quot;Storm Worm has been attacking computer users since January 2007, when it began tricking victims into downloading malicious software, claiming that it was a video of violent storms that had been ravaging Europe.Since then it has been one of the most virulent sources of malware, although it has shrunk in size as detection methods have improved. Recently the network appears to have begun renting out its infected PCs to phishers, according to some researchers.&quot;Storm is an insidious pest. We&#39;ve learned essentially how to manage it,&quot; said Nazario. But, he added, the success of this Christmas campaign proves that the network can still be a serious threat. &quot;They&#39;re great marketers,&quot; he said.&#160;
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The Zafi.D worm, which disguises itself as an e-mail holiday greeting, is currently the most frequently detected worldwide virus, software security company Panda Software said this week.
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Domains of several new phishing sites are cropping up with known Storm worm domains. F-Secure researchers think phishers are leasing parts of the larger botnet.
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Making use of the current trend to send festive greetings via email, a new virus is making the rounds. A variant of the ZAFI worm, the WORM_Zafi.
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Heavy spam squalls herald malware blitz Hackers have launched a malware blitz that poses as a 4 July greeting card.â¦
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Antivirus firm Symantec is facing a denial-of-service attack on its Web site from the latest version of the MyDoom worm. Authors of MyDoom.
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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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Worm is traveling by e-mail, but does not appear to cause much damage.
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A new malicious mass e-mail infected computers across the Internet on Wednesday.
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A variant of the Zafi worm, Zafi.d, is doing the rounds disguised as a Christmas message. This worm arrives via email and through peer-to-peer networks bearing the message &quot;Happy Hollydays&quot; and the subject
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A new family of worms which uses an unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer is spreading widely across the net.
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Tzvetan Ceco Chaliavski's workday begins just like most people's, with a check of his e-mail. But his inbox often contains more than 400 warnings and samples of viruses, worms and all manner of malware.
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Storm Worm spam switches from featuring Christmas strippers to New Year messages.
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Attackers could exploit this vulnerability to create a self-replicating worm attack. No attack code has yet been found in the wild, but users are cautioned to patch as soon as possible.
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A new worm, W32/Funner, is spread over the MSN Messenger instant messaging networks. Experts say it has caused minimal damage, but they say IM networks are ripe for more virus attacks.
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A new variant of the MyDoom worm that exploits an unpatched flaw in Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) browser is in the wild and posing particular risk to home and small business users, security experts warned this week.