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.
Related News:
Spam mail finding success among the young, obese - 1.8.2010
A study recently published in the Southern Medical Journal indicates that overweight and young people were much more likely than others to open spam mail touting weight loss products, with almost one in five overweight college students studied reporting that they actually purchased the products offered.
Spyware researcher says Google should drop partnership with shady advertising partner - 1.7.2010
Harvard Business School professor Ben Edelman has published a report which, he says, details a commercial relationship between search giant Google and a pay-per-click advertising firm called InfoSpace. According to Edelman, InfoSpace uses conversion-inflation traffic - posting ads for websites in ad space on those same websites - from the WhenU spyware program to boost its profit margins.
Controversy flares over ReCaptcha's effectiveness - 12.22.2009
Security researcher BitLand has said in a report that the ReCaptcha technology used by Google to secure itself against logins by bots is flawed, but Google says that it is BitLand's analysis that is defective.
Facebook sues to stop spam - 12.16.2009
Three men are being sued by social networking site Facebook, which alleges that they used phishing to gain access to the user accounts of others and used the hijacked accounts to send spam messages, according to CNET security correspondent Elinor Mills.
Chinese authorities clamping down on website registrations - 12.15.2009
The Chinese government has announced that it will begin requiring business licenses and extensive paperwork in order to register a .cn web domain name.
|
