Spam News

New worm with evolved tricks

Friday, December 26, 2008

Security officials and blogs issued a warning about the Waledac worm making the holiday rounds through a spam email urging users to visit a website claiming it has a Christmas card addressed to them.

The malicious link in the email, if clicked, infects machines with malware and the first signs of it were spotted last Sunday, SCMagazineus.com reports. Once in the machine, the work searches for email address and then sends spam email copies of itself to others.

Some of the elements of the Waledac worm shared some similarities with the Storm Worm, such as using a redirection site and the ability to hide its IP address. The Storm has the tendency to spread near holidays such as New Year's and Mother's Day.

However, the similarities end with the absence of "a peer-to-peer network to communicate and instead uses an open-source executable packer and crpyptography to hide its tracks," according to the article.

While the potential for the Waledac worm to spread remains low because of its late-holiday release, SMBs are urged to block the download of ecard.exe to protect against the malicious spam email.