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Don?t Open that Valentine?s Day E-Card or E-Mail attachment!

by on14 February 2008

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Storm Trojan bot network ready to launch


The Storm Trojan horse has been building its botnet campaign for an apparent launch again this Valentine's Day, according to a warning issued by the FBI.  The Trojan has been running at such incredible volumes that the FBI anticipates millions of phony spam e-mails will be sent on the traditional “love day” disguised as greeting cards and other e-mail advertising. 

Unbeknownst to those who open them, the e-card and other phony links add the user’s computer to the list of the bot network.  According to the FBI, which issued an alert on its home page of its Website, "With the holiday approaching, be on the lookout for spam e-mails spreading the Storm Worm malicious software. The Storm Worm virus has capitalized on various holidays in the last year by sending millions of e-mails advertising an e-card link within the text of the spam e-mail. Valentine's Day has been identified as the next target."

Unfortunately, the FBI is weeks behind others in this warning. Security vendors have been predicting that Storm would again use Valentine’s Day to attempt to fool users into opening attachments or clicking on phony links.

According to Trend Micro Senior Antivirus Researcher, David Sancho, "The spammed e-mail messages are just plain text, but contain links that lead to malicious Web sites displaying one of eight cute Valentine images," he said. "If you run the executable named 'valentine.exe,' your system will join the Storm botnet to start spamming other Internet users," Sancho concluded. "Not very loving of them."

Read more here.

Last modified on 14 February 2008
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