Trojan attacks are trying to take advantage of
the US Fourth of July celebrations.
E-mail and
internet content security provider Marshal is warning e-mail
users to be wary of malicious spam messages playing off today’s
American day of independence.
Marshal has identified a new wave of greeting card spam that
invites recipients to retrieve a 4 July greeting card that someone
has sent them.
The recipient is asked to click on a web link in the message to
access their greeting card. By doing so, they expose themselves to
vulnerability exploits and an executable file named
"ecard.exe".
This is in reality a copy of the
Storm Trojan which compromises the user's PC and merges it into
a botnet - a network of computers that can be commandeered remotely
by a controlling server.
The Storm Trojan first appeared in January 2007. It quickly
gained success and notoriety by using the guise of current affairs
headlines to fool unsuspecting recipients into clicking on a link
which lead to the
Trojan.
Examples of the headlines used included, "Saddam Hussein alive!"
and "Chinese missile shot down by USA aircraft".
"Today's run of the Storm Trojan using the Fourth of July as its
hook continues the theme of exploiting current events to entice
unsuspecting e-mail users into infecting themselves," said
Marshal's director of product management, Bradley Anstis.
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