Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Like sneezing into a Hallmark card

Then sending it to Grandma:

If you've been taken in by an e-mail that says you have an electronic greeting card from a friend or relative, your computer might be infected.

A new multipronged virus e-mail has been making its way around the Internet in recent days, containing a virus nicknamed Storm Trojan.

If, believing there is a genuine card, you click on the link, the destination launches three exploits. If your computer is not vulnerable to the first, it tries the second, and so on.

"Since the Storm Trojan relies on a person to click on a link rather than open an attachment, it makes tracking it more difficult," said Hoala Greevy, CEO of Pau Spam.

The link destination may itself be a compromised computer.

"The trend for assaults like these is a heavy payload of e-mail based attacks during the first four to five days, after which it then subsides," Greevy said. "The goal of attacks like these is to compromise a vast number of computers as quickly as possible, at which point they can be used collectively as a zombie army to spend spam and phishing schemes."



(Via PSoTD)

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