Cybercriminals are attempting to create a botnet network to
launch cyber attacks against Georgian Government computers,
according to Gary Warner, director of computer research and
forensics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Spam e-mails sent by the criminals seek to trick the user into
clicking on a mock-up BBC story about the Georgian president.
The email message says 'Mikheil Saaskahvili gay scandal! New of
this week' before linking recipients to a malicious server that
attempts to infect the user's computer.
Warner's team tracked the messages to 44 computers. Six are
located in Russia and one has been linked to the Russian Ministry
of Education.
Warner believes that while
cyber attacks on Georgia are more intense than those launched
by Russian hackers a year ago against Estonia, there is no evidence
to suggest these attacks are state-sponsored.
"I really doubt this is an action by the Russian government, I
would think that Russia with all its resources and experience in
cyber warfare would do something more effective than put a
website offline for a while, or say the president is gay, if it was
state-sponsored the site would be taken offline for good."
Warner believes the Trojan is the work of hackers from the same
group responsible for attacks on Estonia. He said: "The attack is
so similar it's almost inconceivable that it's not the same
people."