Trojan takes advantage of UK storm

Remote attackers sought to take advantage of the storms battering the UK last week with the launch of new Trojan malware.

Distributors of the Trojan used an e-mail message promising news of the storm that was brewing on Thursday (18 January 2007).

Internet security firm F-Secure said the Trojan was created and launched literally as the storm raged, exploiting a timely wide scale media event as the key mechanism for delivering its payload.
 
The Trojan was distributed in messages with the subject line of “230 dead as storm batters Europe”.

The malicious payload in the message was the Small.DAM Trojan.

This was downloaded onto all vulnerable machines upon opening the spam mail's attachment.

Once inside the machine, the Trojan creates a backdoor that can be exploited later by the malware authors behind the assault.