Social engineering tricks by virus writers took a strange twist this week after hackers bundled malicious code with pictures of a famous dead albino gorilla. The Wurmark-K email worm displays a picture of Snowflake (AKA Copito de Nieve), an inmate of Barcelona Zoo until his death in November 2003, as it goes about its job of infecting Windows machines.

The Wurmark-K worm spreads as an email attachment in emails with subject lines such as "Your Photo Is On A Webpage!!". If recipients open the attached ZIP file and launch the files inside (with names such as Sexy_02.scr or Lover_01.scr) on Windows machines they become infected by the worm and a graphic of an albino gorilla is displayed. As the image is rendered, Wurmark-K installs the Rbot-ABK network worm and backdoor Trojan horse, enabling hackers to subsequently steal information from an unsuspecting user or plant other malicious code.

Although the Wumark worm presents a very serious security threat it's found few takers so far. Most anti-virus vendors rate it as a low risk. In any case it makes sense for surfers to protect their PCs behind personal firewalls and up-to-date anti-virus software. ®

Related stories

Banking Trojan disables MS Anti-Spyware
VXer targets Romanian gypsy music
It's time to pick your favourite virus
Car virus myth debunked