Zafi Worm Hides Behind Christmas Cheer
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A new version of the Zafi e-mail worm is spreading Christmas wishes along with its malicious code, according to antivirus software companies.
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Hackers, spammers and spies go into overdrive in December and January, when unsuspecting neophytes unwrap new computers, connect to the Internet, and, too often, get hit with viruses, spyware and other nefarious programs.
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HELSINKI: Internet security experts warned last Tuesday of a new virulent e-mail worm particularly successful in infecting computers as it is disguised as a multilingual electronic Christmas card.
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Some digital picture frames and other devices sold over the holidays may include malware.
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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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It&#39;s not just good cheer that spreads during the festive season. Also extending their tentacles are a plethora of computer viruses even as e-greeting cards sly about cyberspace.
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Symantec, the world&#39;s leading information security provider, today warned of a new worm threatening computer users in the approach to the Christmas season.
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The Zafi.d worm continued to sweep through the Internet Wednesday, creating such a flood of messages as it replicated that by one security vendor&#39;s estimate, it accounted for 10 percent of the world&#39;s mail.
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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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MicroWorld Software has cautioned Internet users about a new malicious worm known as the W32/Zafi-D. According to the antivirus and content security software provider, W32/Zafi-D behaves in a typical worm manner.
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Security firms are warning about a Windows virus disguising itself as an electronic Christmas card. The Zafi.D virus translates the Christmas greeting on its subject line into the language of the person receiving infected e-mail.
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After a fairly quiet fall, mass-mailing worm starts to spread on Windows PCs. Plus: Air Force turns to Microsoft for security help.
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Bad guys looking for shiny new botnets, Trojans, rootkits, and spyware this holiday season have plenty to choose from.
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A computer virus posing as an electronic Christmas card is spreading across the net.
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A new version of the Santy worm appeared over Christmas, and according to analysis done by some global security firms, may pose a broader threat than its ancestors.
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Program isn't entirely benevolent: it also downloads files to infected PCs.
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Unknown DDoS tool, predecessors A deluge of Trojan-laced spam that slyly tricked recipients by promising information about winter storms ravaging Northern Europe last month was even more crafty than we thought.â¦